UNITED STATES: CIA - Central Intelligence Agency was created by the National Security Act of 1947 in response to the Cold War. CIA relied on many demobilized operatives of the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and organizational advice from the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, though unfortunately, the MI6 liaison was Harold "Kim" Philby, the "third man" in the Russian's Cambridge spy ring. The influence of former OSS operatives remained for decades in CIA's Operations Directorate. One of the best-known Directors of Central Intelligence (DCI), Allen Dulles [1953-1961], spent much of the war in Switzerland encouraging the German resistance to kill Hitler and shorten the war. He resigned after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. His successors, also OSS veterans, pondered any number of assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and the Congo's leftist Patrice Lumumba, but their schemes seemed to suffer a peculiar "passive-aggressive" syndrome - all talk and planning, no results. Inexplicable until Castro's DGI took to Havana television several years ago with a documentary showing that scores of Cuban citizens the CIA thought worked for it were penetration agents of the DGI - including those who were supposed to kill Castro.
The decline of the CIA's reputation can be traced to the Vietnam war period when inaccurate predictions and projections regarding North Vietnamese actions and intentions began to be interpreted as "intelligence failures" by a Congress and public inclined to think of clandestine activities in "James Bond" terms. In 1973, two scandals erupted: Watergate, in which the CIA collaborated with the Nixon White House in providing information as well as disguises for ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt; and clandestine efforts to prevent the election of Marxist Salvador Allende as president of Chile in 1970. At a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February 1973, Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms unexpectedly was sworn; and once under oath, he was asked by Senator Stuart Symington, "Did you try in the CIA to overthrow the government of Chile?"
"No, sir," answered the DCI. Symington then asked, "Did you have money passed to the opponents of Allende?" "No, sir," he replied again. By the time Helms pled guilty in 1977 to two charges of lying to Congress, was fined and given a prison sentence of two years (suspended), DCI William Colby [September 1973 to January 1976] had divulged to the Church Commit- tee hearings the bag of dirty linen known as the "Family Jewels," displayed on the hearing-room table exotic assassination devices, and confirmed to a newspaper reporter the existence of mail intercepts on letters from the Soviet Union and a domestic counterintelligence program called Operation CHAOS, which used the name of the enemy side from the 1960s spy spoof, Get Smart.
In operations against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact during the late 1970s and early 1980s, we now know that the CIA had tremendous successes in penetrating the KGB and Pact intelligence services and obtaining the cooperation of scientists and researchers. Now, a full year after his arrest, as the debriefing of Aldrich Hazen Ames continues, recent reports indicate that more than 100 CIA operations and scores of people cooperating with the United States were betrayed during his more than nine years work for the KGB and that he may have been recruited by the KGB during his 1981-1983 tour of duty in Mexico. The Ames investigation showed that every Russian agent the CIA was running in the mid-to-late 1980s was killed or caught and "turned" by the KGB. Likewise, every agent in East Germany and many in other Warsaw Pact states.
Aside from Ames, the image of the CIA gleaned from the headlines is that it has been all downhill since the 1970s. Until hospitalized to die of brain cancer, President Reagan's choice for Director of Central Intelligence, OSS veteran William Casey, while doing much to rebuild the morale of the Agency, worked personally to the exclusion of many other matters at being the case officer for Central America at a time when Marxist insurrections in Nicaragua and El Salvador were spreading throughout that region. Several CIA clandestine services officers had their careers ruined because they were directed by Casey to work with White House aide Colonel Oliver North's "off-the-shelf" and unauthorized contra support program. This program was subsequently linked to the supply of materiel and munitions to anti-communist groups in Central America and the unlawful import of narcotics into the U.S.
After some years of quiet in the late 1980s under former federal judge and FBI Director William Webster and career intelligence officer Robert Gates, the CIA was blamed for not knowing in 1990 that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein planned to invade and annex Kuwait. In fact, America's intelligence satellites focused mainly on the Soviet Union to provide early warning of imminent attack, assess the wheat and barley crops, count tanks, missiles and ships under construction or at anchor, and perhaps to electronically monitor various Russian communications. Saddam Hussein had to signal his military buildup by inviting journalists to travel from Kuwait by road north to Baghdad. Then the United States took plenty of photographs showing tanks, trucks and supplies moving south. However, based on Saddam's record for bluffing, U.S. officials did not think there was a serious threat of invasion. Washington's inaction [and limp instructions the State Department gave Ambassador April Glaspie] were interpreted by Saddam as a signal the United States would not object seriously if he took Kuwait. The Gulf war showed why highly placed human agents who can, in Tu Mu's words, "give you the facts of the situation in their country and determine its plans against you," are essential.
As a result of the Ames case, CIA paradoxically has worse morale than in the 1970s. Instead of a triumphant "Gotcha!" and satisfaction that Ames will never step outside a maximum security prison again, there is lamenting over all the operations he betrayed. Clinton's DCI James Woolsey made numerous political gaffes, starting in 1993 when he authorized giving the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a blunt, unflattering and fully truthful profile of deposed Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Critics said Woolsey should have realized that Aristide was the protegee of the Congressional Black Caucus, whose support the president needed in the 103rd Congress and that the document might be leaked. At the same time, other critics asked how the DCI in this day and age can refuse or falsify information demanded by Congress. Woolsey, was again perceived as fumbling again in September 1994, when he imposed minor punishments on eleven former and serving CIA officers for their part in not having detected that Ames was working for the Russians. A number of Ames' former superiors who recommended him for promotion or transfer despite his heavy drinking and mediocrity had already retired. The consensus in Congress, more concerned with vote-getting than justice, was that those who remained should have been made an example of by immediate firing and loss of pensions.
Woolsey also was blamed by the media for the CIA's "old boy" club atmosphere in which females are regarded as clerks and secretaries, not as suitable Operations Directorate officers. An atmosphere that had existed since the Agency was formed. The New York Times reported that in July 1994, Janine Brookner, the CIA's first woman chief of station, filed a sex discrimination suit in federal court. Allegedly, she was the first to officially report Ames' flagrant flouting of CIA security rules and if her recommendations had been followed, he would have been fired several months before his spying career for the KGB started. Instead, in malicious retaliation for doing her duty and trying to remove drunken, incompe- tent, wife-beating male CIA officers, her career was ruined. Woolsey, although he was not serving as Director, or had any association with the CIA during the Brookner days, was, of course, held responsible.Operating on a budget of $3 billion, CIA is one of the smallest sectors of the total $28 billion U.S. intelligence budge. With morale currently at rock bottom, U.S. foreign intelligence faces reorganization and down-sizing under the Clinton administration's new nominee as Director of Central Intelligence, retired Air Force General Michael P.C. Carns, 57, a decorated veteran of 200 missions in the Vietnam War, a military manager with a Harvard business degree termed by other Air Force generals "a good wing man" literally and figuratively. Carns has absolutely no experience running intelligence operations. It will take more than the change of the top man to shake up and shape up a CIA that seems determined to shoot itself in the foot. A case in point, this month the Operations Directorate circulated an e-mail message over the internal computer system asking CIA employees to identify everyone in Congress with whom they have "mutually respectful relationships with congressional members," a "working relationship" or "school or family ties." The e-mail message was promptly leaked and interpreted as an illegal lobbying effort.
Yet it is equally clear that the United States will need an improved intelligence agency in the late 1990s and twenty-first century. Intelligence and counterintelligence agencies are expensive and, since human, fallible. However, a nation-state is a sitting duck for its enemies without one.DIA - Defense Intelligence Agency. The DIA provides foreign intelligence and counterintelligence for the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff and Pentagon commands. DIA coordinates the information collected by the intel- ligence services of the Air Force, Army, Marines and Navy. DIA also assigns the military attachees (senior officers from all four services) to U.S. embassies. In peacetime circumstances, the U.S. attachees conduct open liaison with the host country's military. In volatile situations in peacetime, military attachees do become actively involved in covert intelligence activities. DIA's budget is some $600 million.FBI - Federal Bureau of Investigation - the U.S. counterintelligence agency also has responsibility for preparing evidence in federal criminal cases for prosecution and for what remains of domestic intelligence. The FBI's counterintelligence role has faced increasing constraint since the early 1970s when the burglary of the FBI Field Office in Media, Pennsylvania, gave leaders of the pro-Hanoi left in the United States access to classified counterintelligence files. The broad informational sweep of counterintelligence investigations, "dirty tricks" against Moscow-controlled Communists, black militants and civil rights figures, and widespread use of "technical sources" [wiretapping] opened a broad and prolonged attack on the FBI. From having been viewed as one of the most respected government institutions, the FBI's public image plummeted. The public sense of outrage over being let down allowed varied interests - the left that had been trying to get the FBI abolished since the Rosenberg spy ring was rounded up, supporters of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, college students who did not want to be drafted for Vietnam, civil libertarians who believe government should be blind to all political activity, ordinary citizens of varied concerns who viewed the FBI as an enemy - to encourage Members of Congress to excoriate the FBI.
The public view came to be that any mention of a person or organization in the index of a counterintelligence investigation meant the FBI was building a case for prosecution or was targeting them unfairly for "dirty tricks." While reforms of the FBI were essential, the total lack of effective response from senior FBI offi- cials and the shakeups that followed the death of the FBI's founder and sole director to that time, J. Edgar Hoover, left that image standing. By the late 1970s, the FBI had ended domestic counterintelligence. Counterterrorism investigations of the Communist Party, U.S.A. (CPUSA), as an agency of the Soviet Union, and a limited number of terrorist criminal groups, some based in ethno-religious communities [Croat, Puerto Rican, African-American, Hispanic, Armenian, Central American, Jewish, Identity churches], continued. Some counterter- rorism investigations also came under attack by powerful members of Congress.
In part, some attacks on the FBI have had a partisan element to them. Documentary evidence obtained in El Salvador and disseminated openly by the U.S. State Department showed that the Salvadoran Communist Party, assisted by Cuban intelligence officers attached to the Cuban U.N. Mission in New York and leading members of the CPUSA, collaborated in 1980 to establish a solidarity organization for El Salvador's Marxist insurgents. The "trip report" of the Salvadoran who established the solidarity network, Farid Handal, brother of the Salvadorean Communist Party chief, noted that the CPUSA arranged his meeting with Congressman Ronald Dellums, who became a leader of the solidarity group, called CISPES. The solidarity lobby had an impact on public opinion and the decision of the Democratic Congress to cut funds for the Republican Central America policy. Thus, the Democratic Congress was embarrassed when CISPES obtained part of its FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act. By that stage, Dellums was chairing a House Armed Services subcommittee and was a senior figure in the Congressional Black Caucus. The FBI director and senior officials apologized for their "mistake" - which was investigating a group with powerful political connections. Exposing real and alleged misdeeds of the FBI and alleged quirks of J. Edgar Hoover remain part of the regular diet of commercial networks, cable programming and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
China's great military theorist Sun Tzu stated the principle of counterintelligence as concisely as he did that of intelligence: "It is essential to seek out enemy agents who have come to conduct espionage against you. . . ." They should be well paid, comfortably housed and given instructions to operate as an agent in place for as long as possible, he said. This is one of the FBI's most critical responsibilities. The Supreme Court confirmed the government's duty to conduct foreign and domestic counterintelligence activities. In 1967, Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote in U.S. v. Robel (389 U.S. 258), "The Constitution of the United States is not a `suicide pact.' The Nation has the right and duty to protect itself from acts of espionage and sabotage and from attempts to overthrow the Government."In the mid-1980s, the FBI scored some spectacular counterintelligence successes. Using information provided by defectors from the Soviet and Warsaw Pact states and well as information volunteered by American citizens, many spies were arrested. Among the better known spies apprehended by the FBI between 1984 and 1985 were:
Ernst Forbrich, a West German who bought military secrets from U.S. military personnel in the United States and Germany for 17 years; Edward Lee Howard, the dismissed CIA case officer who escaped to Moscow; Thomas Cavanagh, an engineer at Northrop arrested for trying to sell the "Stealth" technology in a "sting" set up after the FBI intercepted his call to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco; Ronald Pelton, a fired National Security Agency (NSA) technician; William Holden Bell, a Hughes project manager in the Advanced Systems Division who from 1978 to 1981 sold advanced radar secrets to the Poles (and Soviets) via his case officer, Marion Zacharski; John Walker and his friends-and-family spy ring in the U.S. Navy; James Harper, who sold Polish and Russian intelligence a huge array of materials on the Minuteman missile system obtained via his mistress who worked for a defense contractor; the swinging Czech illegals Karl and Frieda Koecher, penetration agents trained by Prague's StB, who were the CIA's chief Czech translators; CIA operations staffer Sharon Scranage, who gave secret documents to her Ghanaian intelligence officer lover; and, of course, the FBI's sole known defector to the KGB, counterintelligence agent Richard Miller, who gave the KGB, via his Russian emigrÄ mis- tress, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a secret document outlining U.S. foreign intelligence collection priorities.
At the same time American spies were being caught, the FBI had a good success rate with "dangle" operations in which an American acting under FBI instruction pretends to want to sell secrets to the Russians. When the KGB takes the bait, the U.S. government quietly or publicly, depending on the state of bilateral relations, declares the offending intelligence officers persona non grata. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the United States has been very restrained in PNGing members of the SVRR and GRU. Aleksandr Iosifovich Lysenko, counselor of the Russian Embassy and the SVRR rezident in Washington, was expelled after the arrest of the Ameses, since the intelligence officers marking signals for meetings overseas with Ames worked under his direction.
The FBI still has problems: the public remains ignorant of the difference between informational investigations for intelligence purposes and evidentiary information for court proceedings; many Americans are highly sensitive to privacy issues; unsophisticated FBI agents still write memos and directives easily held up for ridicule; the FBI institution has been sluggish responding to social changes regarding the admission of African- American, Hispanic and female special agents; and inept handling of criticism on the part of the senior FBI officials has made the agency the butt of jokes - "Flaming Bad Investigators."FBI Director Louis Freeh, a former FBI special agent and federal judge, has faced widespread criticism for the FBI's mishandling of the Branch Davidian siege under his predecessor, former Judge William Sessions, who refused to resign and had to be personally fired by President Clinton. At the same time, Freeh is carving out a larger niche for the FBI, expanding the Bureau's international law-enforcement role against organized crime and narcotics trafficking. This has meant the opening of FBI liaison offices in a number of foreign capitals, including Moscow. The FBI's forensics laboratories are world renowned. FBI counterintelligence scored a great coup against the Russians and the CIA in February 1994 when after an investigation of nearly a year in which their superior number of trained counterintelligence investigators collected the evidence needed to terminate the spy careers of Aldrich Hazen Ames, 52, and his Colombian-born wife, Maria del Rosario Casas Ames, two "moles" for the Russian KGB who worked inside the CIA. As a result, the FBI Counterintelligence has been given increased authority to handle counterintelligence investigations of CIA employees. In May 1994, President Clinton established a seven-member National Counterintelligence Policy Board to end the 47-year bureaucratic struggle, sometimes exceedingly acrimonious, between the FBI and CIA.NSA - National Security Agency - had been regarded as the "Big Ears" and "Big Eyes" of the United States until the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) was officially acknowledged after more than a decade of its being a not really "open" secret. The sprawling NSA headquarters complex along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway at Fort Meade [and assorted outlying complexes near Baltimore-Washington International Airport and other sites scattered around the state of Maryland] has two critical functions: maintaining communications security for the United States and breaking the codes of other countries. To carry out that mission, the NSA employs thousands of mathematicians, engineers, computer programmers, cryptanalysts, traffic analysts, linguists and translators backed by banks of antennas, tape recordings and an army of supercomputers looking for the algorithms that will allow a military or diplomatic code to be unraveled. Recent reports put the NSA budget at $4 billion
.Encrypted communications from diplomats, the military including missile-test telemetry and spies get closest attention; but communications broadcast "in the clear" are important. These communications use telephone channels flowing through commercial communications satellites carrying long-distance and international voice telephonic conversations, cellular telephone calls from homes and vehicles, facsimile images, and computer modem messages including e-mail. NSA long has been reported to have computerized equipment to zero in on calls to and from particular telephones of interest, record every conversation and either automatically translate them in fifty languages or to screen them for words of interest. This is one reason that many organized criminals, terrorists and spies use coded phrases or euphemisms.The vast flow of unencrypted communications around the world may have intelligence or commercial value for the United States. The enormous flood of reports on the world's wire services, newspapers, radio and television broadcasts provide a vast amount of open source information - political, economic, environmental - more than all the world's spies ever could. Organized crime and drug cartel funds shifted by wire transfers from one money laundry to another are of interest; so, too, might be the indiscreet conversations of a diplomat in one country to family or colleagues in another. Engineering designs sent between two factories of a foreign defense company may be of interest for industrial and economic intelligence. Several months after the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, for example, investigators reportedly found there were large wire transfers of cash from Iran to the accounts of Ahmed Jibril's Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine - General Command (PFLP-GC). While no report specifically stated that the NSA gleaned the information from the airways, it may have Thus it is extremely useful that U.S. intelligence can intercept and decrypt a great deal of information.In the past, complex and rigorous encryption methods were available only to governments for diplomatic, military and intelligence codes that are changed regularly. For enhanced security, one-time codes often are used. Of course, no encryption system is infallible. Agents may steal encryption codes. With plenty of computer time - expensive computer time - even the very large numbers used as encryption keys can be factored. The NSA evidently plans to take the high-technology route. Last August, NSA awarded the Cray Computer Corporation a $4.2 million contract to develop a new type of supercomputer.
The development of cheap and good encryption software for the general public with the advent of the personal computer horrified NSA. Pretty Good Privacy, one very popular data-protection program, was available on the Internet as shareware. Heightened business and private awareness of the ease with which computer hackers and industrial espionage agents can intercept private banking data, take credit card numbers from computer shopping networks, pry into proprietary business data and communications has led to a growing private-sector market for encryption. The NSA's solution was to try an end run around private encryption by secretly developing the "clipper chip" - an electronic backdoor key.The "clipper chip" was supported by the FBI and other federal law-enforcement agencies and the Clinton administration introduced legislation mandating its use in all U.S.-made electronic communications media - computers, modems, faxes, telephones, and so forth. The "clipper chip" was and is strongly resisted by the telecommunications and computer industries. The computer industry in particular noted that the "clipper chip" would destroy the U.S. export industry since no foreigner would willingly buy machines created to facilitate American eavesdropping. No one in the computer industry believes that the NSA "clipper" does not have some built-in way for the government to easily decrypt any message sent using it. Though the administration backed away from mandating use of the "clipper chip," it intends to mandate its presence in all communications equipment purchased by the U.S. government, hoping to use the enormous purchasing power of the federal government to make the "clipper chip" the de facto standard.
The issue has not died out. Expect the "clipper chip" controversy to return.The NSA works intimately with Britain's GCHQ. NSA's greatest embarrassment in recent years was the discovery that a drunken, drug-using former employee, Ronald Pelton, had sold secrets of U.S. intercepts under the Sea of Okhotsk to Moscow.NRO - National Reconnaissance Office - is the top secret agency formed in 1960 that designs and operates America's "national means of intelligence" - her spy satellites - and is responsible for imaging and data processing. Though the existence of the NRO has been known since the early 1980s when sources leaked its existence hidden in the Directorate of Special Projects of the Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, the NRO was only officially acknowledged recently. In August 1994, the NRO received most unwelcome attention. Satellites are costly. The NRO budget is estimated at $7 billion. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence publicly accused the intelligence community of improperly concealing from Congress the rising cost of a $310 million headquarters for the NRO near Chantilly, Virginia. The "cover" for construction was that it was an office building being built for a major defense contractor. In Senate hearings on August 10, Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey irritated the Senators by listing the number of times the Intelligence Committee had been briefed in secret on the NRO headquarters. In July 1994, the Wall Street Journal noted that the NRO had awarded Martin Marietta a contract worth more than $2 billion to develop and build a new generation of sensing satellites. The contract initially was awarded to TRW, but was reopened after complaints from Martin Marietta and Lockheed.
The NRO operates a battery of satellites with a wide assortment of imaging capabilities. Some are now well known like the Rhyolite or "Big Bird" and the low- altitude KH-11 "Keyhole" series. Reportedly, satellites have capabilities including digital image sensing in real time, infrared sensors to give early warning of ballistic missile launches, SIGINT capabilities to pick up telemetry from missile tests, side-looking radars capable of imaging while the satellite is near the horizon, and radar imaging capable of penetrating cloud cover and even vegetation. Allegedly, the current satellites are so sensitive they can detect a single Russian border guard lighting his cigarette. A great blow to the U.S. sensing satellites came after a low- level ex-CIA employee, William Kampiles, stole the operating manual for the KH-11 and sold it to the KGB in 1978. After a short time, the Russians realized the fine resolution of the cameras and that it broadcast its images in real time to distant processing centers in places like Australia. The Soviets started putting missiles and aircraft under wraps, camouflage became a Russian military high art, missile test telemetry was encrypted. Clearly Moscow now was aware of the capabil- ities of the Keyhole through which the United States was looking. Kampiles was caught and sentenced to a forty- year federal prison term.
URUGUAY: DII - Directorate of Information and Intelligence - Uruguay's intelligence directorate.SID - Defense Intelligence Service - Uruguay.SIDE - Army Intelligence Service - Uruguay.
VENEZUELA: DIM - Military Intelligence Directorate - of Venezuela.DISIP - Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services. Venezuela's intelligence and counterintelligence.
VIETNAM: Despite the advent in 1987 of the policy of doi moi [reform], Vietnam's version of perestroika, and the recent commencement of formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Hanoi, Vietnam remains a milita- rized country - at least for the time being. Military veterans head the government - President Le Duc Ahn, 85, for example, is a four-star army general and Prime Minister Vo Vann Kiet, 73, is a senior general.The Interior Ministry, which has been growing in authority in recent years as a result of doi moi, has responsibilities for counterintelligence and secret police operations. The Interior Ministry's Tong Cuc Phan Gian [Counterintelligence General Department] is headed by Major General Duong Thong, and according to 1995 visitors to Hanoi is motivated by a hatred for all things American. The most important intelligence and counter- intelligence organizations operate under the General Political Department of the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN).
