September 18, 2000
CIA, FBI and Pentagon team to fight terrorism
<http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0900/091900nj.htm>
By James Kitfield, National Journal
Barely three weeks after the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of American embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania left 258 people dead and more than 5,000 wounded,
Attorney General Janet Reno received a classified briefing by senior
officials in the FBI’s International Counterterrorism Operations Center.
The FBI had sent roughly 300 FBI agents to Africa to work on the case and
were already on the verge of making their first arrests. They also
had intelligence indicating that the bombings were the work of a
terrorist network run by Saudi-born Islamic zealot Osama bin Laden.
Reno was insistent that the CIA be fully apprised of the FBI’s findings,
according to sources present at the classified briefing on the
5th floor of the FBI’s headquarters. Reno
was so concerned about CIA-FBI cooperation that she broke in abruptly
during the briefing to again stress the point. You have to make sure,
Reno repeated, that the CIA knows about this.
At that point, the deputy director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division
spoke up and said: “Madam Attorney General, I’m from the CIA. I assure
you the agency is fully aware of this intelligence.” What Reno didn’t
realize was that her No. 2 official for counterterrorism was in fact a
CIA agent, and that over in Langley, Va., the CIA’s No. 2 official for
counterterrorism was an FBI agent. The two rival outfits had already
swallowed their pride, ingested the message of agency cooperation that
had been tossed at them for years by Congress, and allowed previously
hostile agents into their midst.
More recently, FBI and CIA counterterrorism experts worked together to
thwart another suspected bin Laden bombing plot that was timed to
coincide with year 2000 celebrations, and which targeted many hundreds
and perhaps thousands of Americans for injury and death. Indeed, after
years of resisting such cooperation, as much for bureaucratic reasons as
for constitutional ones, the CIA, FBI, and now the Defense Department
believe that the federal government must reorganize itself in a more
collaborative way if it is to successfully combat new threats from
terrorists, spies, cybersleuths, and international criminal groups who
have few ties to foreign governments.
Most significant, senior officials of the CIA, FBI, Defense Department,
and National Security Council have worked quietly for more than a year to
draft a plan to broaden cross-agency cooperation to encompass virtually
the government’s entire national security apparatus. Called
“Counter-Intelligence 21,” or CI-21 to insiders, the plan, which includes
a new governmentwide counterintelligence czar, has been undergoing
finishing touches after input from the Senate Intelligence Oversight
Committee.
The executive order should be ready for President Clinton’s signature in
coming weeks. If successful, the reforms will institutionalize a level of
cooperation never before seen between the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
In the process, CI-21 may also force lawmakers and the American public to
rethink long-accepted notions of what constitutes national security, as
well as the once-clear boundaries between domestic law enforcement,
foreign intelligence gathering, and defense preparedness.
“Everyone who works this problem has quickly realized that the old
paradigm of the threats to U.S. national security-hostile nations and
their intelligence services-is far too narrow of a definition in the
post-Cold War era,” said John McGaffin, a longtime CIA operative and FBI
consultant who spearheaded the CI-21 effort. “There are countless
potential bad guys capable of doing us significant harm.”
McGaffin also said that during the CI-21 drafting process, the various
agency officials discovered “this terrible disconnect” in which the
makers of national security policy in the White House and State and
Defense departments simply were not talking to the counterintelligence
and counterterrorism communities. More important, the spies and
counterspies found it hard to do their work because the policy-makers had
not laid out new definitions of national security. No longer is national
security simply about protecting armies, navies, and military
secrets-it’s about defending the banking system, the Internet, and new
technologies. Said McGaffin: “Because the policy community has not
defined or prioritized the ‘crown jewels’ of American prosperity and
national security, we in the intelligence community cannot tell if those
assets are being threatened or adequately protected.”
A Hidden Menace
Most Americans perceive the United States as a nation at peace abroad and
prosperous and secure at home. A globe-spanning U.S. military helps keep
the lid on conflicts around the world, no superpower rival appears yet on
the horizon, and the U.S. economy cruises along in hyperdrive with the
help of Information Age technologies.
Yet, select lawmakers and intelligence experts are troubled. They
remember the terrorist bombings aimed at U.S. citizens in such places as
the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, the Khobar Towers complex in
Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in
1998. They’re aware of just how narrowly the United States averted
similar bombings during millennium celebrations in January. They’ve seen
classified intelligence showing that numerous terrorist organizations,
including the loose network linked to Osama bin Laden, are now actively
seeking chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons of
terrible lethality, and these groups are seriously contemplating their
use.
Nor is it difficult for these analysts to see a malevolent hand behind
“Moonlight Maze,” a massive cyberassault on U.S. computer networks
that was first detected in 1998 and that the FBI has traced to Russia.
The experts also know that the eyes and ears of the U.S. intelligence
community went dead in January, when computers at the eavesdropping
National Security Agency crashed unexpectedly. They know the details
behind what many consider a botched counterintelligence investigation of
Wen Ho Lee at the Los Alamos national laboratory in New Mexico. They
ponder the unexplained disappearance of top-secret computer data at Los
Alamos and the U.S. State Department during the past year. They haven’t
forgotten that unknown accomplices of accused Russian spy Stanislav
Gusev, who was expelled from the United States in December, were able to
implant a secret listening device into the wall of a supposedly secure
State Department conference room near the office of Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright.
Intelligence experts say these newer, more insidious threats to national
security are just as real as the threat of a conventional military attack
on the United States or its interests. “As we face a new century, we face
a new world where nation-states remain the most important and powerful
players, but where multinational corporations, nongovernmental
organizations, and even individuals can have a dramatic impact,” said CIA
Director George Tenet in testimony earlier this year before the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence. “It is against that backdrop that I
want to describe the realities of our national security environment in
the first year of the 21st century-where
technology has enabled, driven, or magnified the threat to us; where
age-old resentments threaten to spill over into open violence; and where
a growing perception of our so-called ‘hegemony’ has become a lightning
rod for the disaffected.”
Congressional Alarm
Taking those warnings to heart, a spate of congressional committees and
independent panels has strongly criticized the federal government in
recent months for failing to adequately adapt to the changing threats.
The critiques, which recommend many different solutions, are varied and
disjointed. But intelligence oversight committees on Capitol Hill agree
that federal responsibility for counterintelligence and counterterrorism
is too divided among a hodgepodge of agencies that lack direction and
accountability. In their view, law enforcement, defense, and intelligence
agencies too often seem more interested in defending their turf than in
coordinating their efforts and sharing sensitive intelligence.
A congressionally mandated report by the National Commission on Terrorism
that was released in June, for instance, faulted both the CIA and FBI for
being “overly risk averse” and insufficiently aggressive in investigating
terrorist organizations. “We’ve found that in many areas, the federal
government is stymied by bureaucratic and cultural obstacles to the quick
and broad collection of important intelligence,” said L. Paul Bremer III,
a former career diplomat who chaired the commission.
The Senate Appropriations Committee, citing the FBI’s lack of adequate
focus on new threats, recently approved spending $23 million to fund a
new domestic counterterrorism “czar” at the highest levels of the Justice
Department, although the idea is opposed by the Clinton Administration.
Meanwhile, in July, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill authored by
Rep. Tillie K. Fowler, R-Fla., that would create a six-person
Council of Terrorism Preparedness, chaired by the President, to eliminate
bureaucratic confusion and wasteful overlap in preparing the nation
against terrorist attack. Not to be outdone, the House Select Committee
on Intelligence recently released its own scathing assessment of the U.S.
intelligence community, faulting it for poor organization and calling for
a more “corporate” approach to intelligence gathering that includes the
entire intelligence and national security complex.
Intelligence Reform
Administration officials note that much has already been done to address
these criticisms. In 1998, for instance, the Justice Department and the
FBI created an intra-agency National Defense Preparedness Office to
coordinate government efforts to prepare for terrorist attacks involving
weapons of mass destruction. They also created a National Infrastructure
Protection Center at FBI headquarters to coordinate efforts to protect
government and private computer networks from cyberattacks. The
Pentagon’s National Security Agency recently announced “Project
Trailblazer,” an initiative to develop a
21st-century “signals intelligence” system
that can crack new encryption software, hard-to-tap fiber-optic cables,
and cellular phone transmissions.
Meanwhile, the FBI’s focus on counterintelligence and counterterrorism
operations has led to an almost fivefold increase in FBI intelligence
officers in the past eight years (from 224 in 1992 to 1,025 today), and a
corresponding but classified increase in FBI field agents, according to a
report released in August by a Syracuse University research center.
What is lacking, say national security experts-echoing the congressional
critique-is a central strategy and focused leadership to make sense of
the new threats and to coordinate an overall government response. The
Administration’s answer is the new Counter-Intelligence 21 initiative. It
would create a national counterintelligence executive with independent
resources and staff to act as a focal point and conduit between
policy-makers, Congress, and private industry on the one hand, and the
intelligence, law enforcement, and defense communities on the other. This
counterintelligence czar would be appointed by, and answer to, a National
Counter-Intelligence Board of Directors composed of the head of the FBI,
the deputy director of the CIA, and the deputy secretary of Defense. He
or she would closely coordinate policy with a senior steering group drawn
from relevant government agencies.
The key function of the national counterintelligence executive (or NCIX
in government-speak) would be to first develop a national
counterintelligence strategy identifying and prioritizing the keys to
American prosperity and security. The executive would then coordinate the
efforts of the intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities to
protect those assets from conventional and unconventional threats.
CI-21, however, is not a revolutionary change. In many ways, it simply
advances-albeit significantly-an evolution that began in the mid-1990s
when circumstances forced the CIA and FBI to begin abandoning their own
long rivalry and history of animosity. “CI-21 is a manifestation of a
process that began five or six years ago, when we all began to realize
that the threats to U.S. security were changing in a way that our
traditional organizations and structures couldn’t match,” McGaffin said.
“Globalization and technology were lowering traditional boundaries
between what constitutes an international or domestic threat, and
terrorists, drug cartels, spies, and hackers were all leaping those
boundaries with impunity.”
For the first time in their history, said McGaffin, the CIA and FBI began
to realize in the mid-1990s that their missions overlapped significantly
in numerous areas. “For instance, is counterterrorism a law enforcement
or intelligence mission?” The answer is both, he said. “That doesn’t mean
spies should get involved in law enforcement, or FBI agents in spying. It
does mean that both agencies had to increasingly start leveraging one
another.”
As is often the case, a catastrophe was required first to blast through
the cultural and bureaucratic barriers that separated the CIA and FBI.
That event was the arrest of a former high-ranking CIA operative and
Russian mole named Aldrich Ames.
Cities on Separate Hills
Many intelligence professionals still recall where they were on Feb. 21,
1994, when FBI agents pulled over a Jaguar driven by Ames and arrested
the senior CIA operative. Ames had been the counterintelligence branch
chief in the CIA’s Russia Division. But as it turns out, he had been
acting as a Soviet and then Russian mole for eight years, selling Moscow
the names of every important Soviet military and intelligence officer
working secretly for the United States. The Soviets executed 10 of these
officers based on Ames’ information, and replaced them with double agents
who for many years passed false information to the CIA that severely
distorted Soviet capabilities and intentions. Ames represented the worst
case of betrayal and the most profound intelligence failure in CIA
history, and it devastated the morale of the entire intelligence
community.
Nearly as shocking as the scope of the betrayal was the fact that it had
continued for six years after Ames first drew suspicion for his grand
style of living and well-known drinking binges. During that time, senior
CIA officials steadfastly refused to believe, even in the light of
growing evidence, that one of their own senior officials could be a
double agent for the Soviet Union. CIA officials thus resisted sharing
their concerns or asking for help from FBI counterespionage
experts.
“For a very long time, the CIA and FBI had found ways to talk past each
other and refuse to cooperate with one another. We had built cities on
separate hills, and that wasn’t very smart,” a senior CIA official said.
“The dramatic events surrounding the Ames investigation helped us
recognize how much was to be gained by cooperating with the FBI. But it
meant overcoming decades of mistrust.”
The scope of the Ames scandal, however, irretrievably changed the dynamic
between the two agencies. “The fallout from the Ames case was the key
catalyst to change. It became our Tailhook scandal, because afterward
nobody could argue against reform,” said a senior CIA counterintelligence
expert, noting that a number of the post-Ames reforms called for placing
senior FBI officials inside CIA headquarters at Langley. “I mean
prior to Ames, the idea of having an FBI official inside CIA headquarters
running counterespionage would have been heresy! And for the first few
years, it was definitely a shotgun marriage.”
With congressional outrage over Ames hanging over the White House’s head,
then-National Security Council official George Tenet penned in 1994
Presidential Decision Directive 24, a document that instituted the
post-Ames reforms. The directive placed a senior FBI official in charge
of counterespionage-the spy vs. spy operations-inside CIA headquarters in
Langley, and established a National Counterintelligence Center at the
CIA-run by an FBI official-to take on the broader mission of protecting
American secrets and assets. Tenet went to the CIA in 1995 as deputy
director, where both he and Director John Deutch were reform-minded
leaders. Later, when Tenet became director of the CIA himself, he helped
ensure that not only the letter but also the spirit of the post-Ames
reforms would be embraced.
“I think the Ames case was the jumping off point in taking cooperation
between the FBI and CIA seriously, because it proved that we could no
longer tolerate petty bureaucratic jealousy and turf wars in dealing with
threats to American security,” Tenet said in an interview. “And from the
very beginning, we consciously sought to institutionalize the reforms at
all working levels so that they would become steeped in our culture and
not dependent on transient personalities. We wanted people to understand
that, when it came to dealing with these transnational threats, the
fortunes and efforts of both agencies would rise and fall
together.”
Cautious Honeymoon
To keep the momentum for cooperation going forward as the Ames scandal
subsided, both Deutch and FBI Director Louis Freeh instituted a series of
weekly deputies’ meetings that became known as the “Gang of Eight”
sessions. Led on the CIA side by then-Deputy Director Tenet, and
including on the FBI side Deputy Director for National Security Robert
“Bear” Bryant, the Gang of Eight explored new avenues for teamwork
between their two agencies, reporting once a month to the agency
directors. Before long, the Gang of Eight became the strongest proponents
within their respective agencies for an entirely new relationship between
the CIA and FBI. Their goal was to respect the significant legal and
statutory distinctions between law enforcement and espionage, but to
eliminate the “arms length” attitude that had severely hamstrung
cooperative FBI and CIA efforts in the past.
In an effort to allay deep-seated suspicions among the rank and file in
both agencies, officials convened a meeting in Rome in 1996 for all the
overseas FBI legal attaches and CIA station chiefs in Europe and the
Middle East. Participants were encouraged to air their differences and
gripes. They did. They clashed openly, as CIA officials played to type as
tweedy Georgetown intellectuals and FBI agents came across as blue-collar
beat cops.
“From our point of view, it seemed at first that FBI legal attaches
ranked somewhere just above chauffeur in the embassy hierarchy,” said one
senior CIA official who was present. “They had very little international
experience or foreign language capability, and their main concern seemed
to be fugitive bank robbers. It was almost embarrassing. The CIA station
chief, on the other hand, is a pretty powerful position in the embassy,
and he often serves as the ambassador’s point man on major strategic
issues. So there was initially this cultural dichotomy, where you felt
that the CIA guys would be going to the opera after the meeting, while
the FBI guys were going to see the latest shoot-‘em-up movie. However, by
the end of the
summit-after a great Italian meal and lots of wine-there was a good
meeting of the minds. Even today, when we refer to the improved
cooperation between the agencies, we talk about the ‘Spirit of Rome.’
“
One of the charter members of the Gang of Eight was then-CIA General
Counsel Jeffrey Smith, who had served as general counsel to the Senate
Armed Services Committee when it passed the landmark Goldwater-Nichols
defense reforms of 1986. One of the key lessons of that successful reform
effort-largely aimed at overcoming rivalries among the four armed
services-was to require those in uniform to serve “joint” tours with the
other services. To attract the best and brightest to those joint tours,
Goldwater-Nichols also made the tours a prerequisite to promotion and
thus career enhancers. In a somewhat less formal fashion, Smith,
McGaffin, and other members of the Gang of Eight set out to mirror that
success by selecting the CIA and FBI’s best people for joint assignments,
and then promoting them up the chain of command to institutionalize a new
level of cooperation.
“Having worked on Goldwater-Nichols, I definitely tried to apply those
lessons by finding ways to task our best CIA officials to FBI
headquarters as a ‘joint assignment,’ and vice versa,” said Smith, now a
partner in the Washington law firm of Arnold & Porter. “We also
increasingly established joint FBI-CIA task forces to go after specific
targets. That was an important move, because in their enthusiasm and
desire to get results, the teams learned to work together and break down
institutional barriers, whether they were going after terrorists,
international criminal groups, drug cartels, or foreign intelligence
operatives.”
One area lent itself naturally to common cause between the FBI and
CIA-international terrorist operations targeting U.S. citizens or
interests. The United States has followed a strategy in these cases of
bringing perpetrators to justice before U.S. courts, with the
possibility of tough sentences in U.S. prisons or even the death penalty.
That goal requires close and careful cooperation between the CIA
operatives responsible for surveillance and infiltration of foreign
terrorist groups and FBI agents tasked with making arrests and gathering
evidence that can be used in open court. Indeed, the synergistic and
often-successful efforts of the CIA and FBI in the realm of
counterterrorism over the past five years largely laid the foundation and
provided the momentum for the reforms embodied in Counter-Intelligence
21.
The Counterterrorism Model
When FBI agent Dale Watson received a call from Deputy Director Bryant,
asking him to consider taking a job as the deputy director of the CIA’s
Counterterrorism Center, he didn’t have to think long about his reply:
Thanks, but no thanks.
“I basically told him that I didn’t know or like those people, and that I
liked my current job just fine,” said Watson, now the assistant director
in charge of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. Given the “out of
sight, out of mind” nature of the FBI bureaucracy, Watson knew that such
assignments were also infamous for stalling careers. Bryant assured him,
however, that the rules were changing, and the next time he called Watson
about the CIA job, he wasn’t asking, but telling him to take it.
“And without a doubt, that time at the CIA turned into one of the best
assignments I ever had,” Watson said. “While it was a steep learning
curve at first, and I encountered pockets of resistance to my being
there, we all began to see the tremendous value to both agencies of that
kind of cross-pollination and transparency in terms of our
counterterrorism operations.”
Early on, so much internal skepticism greeted the program to swap deputy
directors at the FBI and CIA counterterrorism centers that insiders
informally referred to the swap as the “hostage exchange program.” CIA
officials worried that sensitive intelligence would find its way into
open court proceedings, compromising the agency’s sacrosanct “sources and
methods.” Closer coordination with the FBI would also undoubtedly attract
the attention of civil libertarians concerned that the CIA was crossing
the red line barring the agency from spying on Americans. For their part,
FBI officials worried that closer cooperation would taint them overseas
because of the CIA’s reputation for cutting legal corners and
cloak-and-dagger shenanigans.
What neither side could deny, however, was the obvious synergy of the
counterterrorism partnership. The FBI gained insight not only into the
CIA’s vast overseas network, but also into the operations of friendly
intelligence services that often cooperated secretly with the CIA. The
CIA gained a partner who could use sensitive intelligence to head off a
planned terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and, most important, bring
perpetrators to justice.
“I help run America’s spy service, but if I believe my job is finished
after I’ve collected that intelligence, I should be fired,” a senior CIA
official said. “In working with the FBI, we found ways to ensure that the
intelligence we gathered was used by those who need it most. And what’s
made the cooperation so successful is the FBI’s ability to set up ‘chains
of custody’ and other means to make sure they gather needed evidence in a
way that doesn’t put our sources at risk. So we’ve put most of those
concerns to rest. That’s not to say the relationship is perfect. We still
disagree sometimes, but now when we disagree we just get on the phone
with one another and work it through.”
The proof of that cooperation, according to officials, is the
fingerprints of both the FBI and CIA on a number of high-profile
counterterrorism cases in recent years. In one of the most sensational
examples, FBI and CIA agents in 1997 tracked down Mir Aimal Kansi, the
gunman who killed two CIA employees in a 1993 attack outside the main
gate of the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia, and snatched him during a
daring raid in Pakistan. In the foot-stomping celebration at Langley
following the operation, CIA officials noted approvingly that some of the
loudest cheers came from the FBI agents involved.
CIA-FBI cooperation was also critical to the successful apprehension and
prosecution of those involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; in
the 1993 apprehension of Omar Ali Rezaq for the hijacking of an Egypt Air
flight in which 58 people died; in the 1998 arrest of Mohammed Rashid for
the 1982 bombing of a Pan Am flight; and in the 1996 apprehension of
Tsutomu Shirosaki for a rocket attack against the U.S. Embassy in
Jakarta, Indonesia.
“The Shirosaki case was a pretty typical international fugitive case,”
said the FBI’s Watson. “We had an old indictment and arrest warrant on
him, and the CIA developed information that he was in ‘X’ country. After
we made sure that the case was good and witnesses still in place, the CIA
worked with the host country and facilitated us going over and picking
him up. If our efforts were still fragmented, and we hadn’t learned to
coordinate with the CIA, we would never have been able to get that guy
back to the United States.”
Watson also credits close FBI-CIA collaboration in the investigation into
the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. This joint
effort quickly traced the attacks back to the terrorist network of bin
Laden. Within 21 days of the bombings, the first suspects were behind
bars. Since July 1998, FBI-CIA counterterrorism operations have
apprehended and prosecuted more than two dozen suspected terrorists, more
than half of whom are associates of bin Laden’s organization.
Bin Laden’s complicity is also suspected in the Y2K terrorist operation,
which was thwarted by what FBI and CIA officials consider perhaps the
most successful pre-emptive counterterrorism operation to date. First
alerted to the planned attacks last September, both agencies cooperated
with foreign intelligence and police services to disrupt terrorist cells
in eight countries, with arrests made in the United States, Jordan,
Pakistan, and Canada.
“I can guarantee you that the millennium operation was an example where
the cooperative counterterrorism system now in place was directly
responsible for saving hundreds, and possibly even thousands, of American
lives,” said a senior CIA counterterrorism expert. “Several tons of
explosives were confiscated, as were well-designed plans with specific
targets identified to kill the maximum number of Americans in as bloody
and high-profile fashion as possible for the sake of the CNN cameras.
This was an operation designed to shock the United States away from its
geopolitical goals in the Middle East.”
Not everyone is sanguine, however, about the new spirit of cooperation
between law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Although CIA agents
are still barred from spying on Americans and engaging in domestic
intelligence gathering, some watchdog groups are concerned about the
blurring of traditional barriers between FBI and CIA operations. Some of
those firewalls were put in place in the mid-1970s after a congressional
investigation headed by former Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, found that the
CIA had illegally spied on political dissidents in the United
States.
“I don’t think you can point to any terrible scandal that has resulted
from the closer cooperation between the FBI and CIA, but the once clear
division of labor between them is beginning to blur in the realms of
counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and counternarcotics,” said John
Pike, a defense analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, an
independent watchdog group in Washington. “That raises some yellow flags.
The two agencies work under very different sets of principles.
Essentially, the FBI is constrained by constitutional protections and
dedicated to gathering evidence and enforcing the law. The CIA
specializes in stealing secrets, skirting the law, and not getting
caught. If they’re going to cooperate more, someone needs to pay very
careful attention that those distinctions in how they operate don’t get
blurred as well.”
But architects of the CI-21 initiative are not likely to retreat now.
Indeed, the new counterintelligence plan seeks to enlist Pentagon
intelligence officials. “The intent behind CI-21 is to bring the defense
and national security community into the same kind of theoretical
construct that we developed for the FBI and CIA in counterterrorism,”
McGaffin said. “We wanted to expand that interagency cross-pollination
and commonality of purpose into the broader realm of
counterintelligence.”
A Counterintelligence Czar
On a flight back to Washington after a cyberwarfare conference in Texas
in 1998, the FBI’s Bryant had a lengthy discussion with then-Deputy
Defense Secretary John Hamre about “Moonlight Maze”-the most pervasive
cyberassault ever on the U.S. national computer network. During that
electronic invasion-ultimately traced to Moscow-intruders systematically
raided hundreds of essential but unclassified computer systems used by
the Pentagon, NASA, the Energy Department, and several universities. “It
was as if the Russians were coming into the Pentagon every night and
measuring the curtains in all the offices, and we did not know why or if
anything of importance was taken,” said a knowledgeable intelligence
source.
Largely as a result of the discussions, Bryant and Hamre began organizing
twice-monthly meetings of senior officials from the Defense Department,
FBI, CIA, and the National Security Council, essentially expanding the
“Gang of Eight” to include the leaders of other agencies responsible for
U.S. national security. Although the initial meetings focused on the
issue of cyberattacks, the participants soon realized that their
respective agencies were facing a host of new and unconventional threats
for which they were unprepared and poorly organized to counter. Those
meetings and the interagency concerns they uncovered launched the
Counter-Intelligence 21 initiative.
“Moonlight Maze did help convince me that we needed a new structure that
would allow the national security community to coordinate and work
together better, because I was confronted by a problem that I lacked the
legal authority to fix on my own,” said Hamre, now the president of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank
in Washington. The Defense Department is barred from conducting
surveillance or investigations of civilians inside U.S. borders, he
said, while the law enforcement community lacks many of the tools to
investigate outside the United States. “These borders of
responsibility are deeply embedded in American government, yet they are
increasingly irrelevant in a more globalized, interconnected world,”
Hamre said. “Essentially, Counter-Intelligence 21 is an effort to
bridge those internal divides in government in a way that protects
Americans from the bad guys while still ensuring their constitutional
rights. That’s why I made signing off on CI-21 literally my last
act as deputy director of Defense.”
It’s not yet clear whether the CI-21 reforms will work. Unless the new
counterintelligence czar has the full backing of the heads of the CIA,
FBI, and the Defense Department and real influence on budgetary
decisions, he or she may fall short on bureaucratic clout. Proponents
fear the reforms might yet get watered down as Clinton Administration
officials prepare to leave office. Nor is it clear whether CI-21 will be
considered an adequate answer to congressional concerns, or whether it
will conflict with the lawmakers’ idea of a domestic counterterrorism
czar. “I fully support CI-21, but there are a lot of czars and czarinas
running around Washington, and that runs the risk of future fights over
bureaucratic fiefdoms,” said Smith, a former CIA general counsel. “Over
time, I suspect we’ll see an emerging pattern of czars or viceroys
coordinating their interagency activities whenever these missions
intersect.”
The new counterintelligence executive will ultimately be judged by his or
her ability to anticipate and limit new threats to U.S. national
security. A counterintelligence czar might have predicted that China
would target the nuclear secrets contained at the national weapons
laboratories, if he understood that China had aspirations for a nuclear,
blue-water navy, yet was unwilling to risk international isolation by
violating the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Or he might have
argued successfully that Russian spy Stanislav Gusev be used to
disseminate disinformation or learn the Russians’ true intentions,
instead of being arrested quickly and expelled. Or a counterintelligence
czar, aware that the Middle East peace process was entering a critical
stage and that terrorist groups opposed to it might be looking to derail
a U.S.-brokered deal, might have anticipated the Y2K operation even
earlier.
“The general premise behind CI-21 is to try to determine what are
America’s true equities, and then to extend this interagency cooperation
in a systematic way to try to better protect those assets and deter acts
of espionage that target them,” said the CIA’s Tenet. “We can no longer
afford to focus our counterintelligence efforts only after an incident
has sparked a full criminal case, because at that point it’s too late.
The damage has been done.”