Counterintelligence Run Amok
By JAY TAYLOR
Fear of foreign spies was already inordinately high in the United States
when the sensational espionage charges against Robert Philip Hanssen hit the
headlines. The media and the public, always starved for drama, have been
captivated. The executive branch is planning tough-sounding remedies,
including new super organizations. Existing counterintelligence bureaucracies
have exploited the "crisis" to grow and expand. And counterspy measures,
resources and personnel are already greater than they were during the height
of the Cold War.
President Bush is expected soon to approve establishment of a new
counterintelligence policy board headed by a counterintelligence czar who
will report to a new counterintelligence board of directors. This, despite
the fact that there is no more KGB, no more Soviet Union.
Judging by discussions in the media, the new so-called proactive
measures being planned are those that monitor our own people and control
sensitive documents. An example of one of these measures is the explosion in
job opportunities for internal security agents in the State Department. If
former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's plan is carried out, State
will hire 500 new security agents, bringing the total of such officers in the
foreign service to 1,500. This compares with a total of only 2,500 foreign
service officers who perform the department's core work of
diplomacy--reporting, analysis, advocacy and negotiation on bilateral and
international issues--including ambassadors, their deputies and other program
direction officers.
While security expands, some 700 other foreign service positions remain
vacant because of lack of funding. Some of the work normally done by
diplomats is now being performed by officers in our foreign missions from the
CIA and the Pentagon, neither of which have a comparable budget problem.
Yet the current danger we face from foreign espionage is a mere fraction
of that posed from the 1930s to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The
mighty KGB's successor, the SVR, like the Soviet Navy and all the other wings
of the old Communist regime's security establishment, is a shadow of its
former self. For eight years, the SVR did not even contact Hanssen, one of
the best-positioned moles in the United States the old KGB ever had. Except
for Cuba, the SVR has lost all of the KGB's sister services, including the
once extraordinarily effective East German Stasi. Moreover, since the
emergence of Russia as a relatively open but very strained society, the
ability of Western services to penetrate the SVR has geometrically increased.
The double agent in the SVR who exposed the apparent double-crosser Hanssen
apparently handed over the entire KGB file.
The deeds of our counterspy turncoats resulted in the deaths of some of
our Russian moles and are deserving of harsh punishment, but the consequences
of their actions had no critical impact on vital U.S. interests. Notably, the
FBI tunnel under the Russian Embassy in Washington reportedly revealed by
Hanssen apparently produced no major intelligence. (Likewise the previous big
American tunneling exercise, the famous 1950s CIA dig in Berlin, was a bust
from the start. A Russian mole in London tipped off the KGB to the project
before it even began.)
To declare to the press, as some intelligence sources are doing, that
Hanssen and Aldrich Ames brought about the "greatest losses in the history of
American intelligence" is to focus on damage to the counterspy organizations
themselves and not to basic national interests, as for example was the case
in the theft of nuclear secrets or submarine codes.
The massive spying and internal security apparatus of the KGB did not
save the Soviet Union. Why now, when we face no such monolithic monster, do
we need a counterintelligence czar, expanded polygraphs, more intrusive
monitoring of personnel, a draconian "official secrets act" and many more
internal security agents in the State Department and elsewhere?
We won the hot and cold wars the old way, by maintaining a reasonable
level of internal controls but concentrating on offense--penetration, mole
implantation and communications intercepts. We need to safeguard
counterintelligence and other sensitive information, but the possibilities
and the consequences of both foreign espionage and counterspying should be
kept in perspective.
As George F. Kennan, architect of America's Cold War containment policy,
once observed, counterintelligence takes on aspects that cause it to be
viewed as a game, played in its own right. The fascination it exerts, he
concluded, tends wholly to obscure, even for the general public, the original
reasons for it.
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Jay Taylor Was Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence
Coordination in the Reagan Administration
