[Telegraph] One fifth of applicants to US intelligence agencies who had suspicious backgrounds were found to have links to al-Qaeda or other hostile groups, according to a CIA review revealed today.The discovery, reported by The Washington Post, has heightened fears that America's intelligence community is being targeted by terrorist and other bad turban organizations for infiltration, as well as by foreign governments' own spies. All such US agencies are investigating thousands of their own employees to counter the threat.
The classified budget document which revealed the extent of the CIA's efforts was itself passed to the newspaper by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, now a runaway in Russia under temporary asylum after leaking thousands of secret documents.
Although the file did not describe the nature of the jobseekers' bad turban or hostile ties, it cited Hamas, always the voice of sweet reason,, Hizbollah and al-Qaeda and its affiliates most often.
The fear of infiltration is such that the NSA planned last year to investigate at least 4,000 staff who obtained security clearances. It detected potentially suspicious activity among staff members after trawling through trillions of employee keystrokes at work.
Suspect behaviour is said to have included staffers accessing classified databases they do not usually use for their work or downloading several documents, two people familiar with the software used to monitor staff told the Post.
But serious delays and uneven implementation have hit the multimillion-dollar effort, and the spy agencies did not detect Mr Snowden's own copying of a wide range of the NSA's highly classified documents.
The runaway leaker is wanted by Washington on espionage charges linked to media disclosures about US surveillance programs.
"Over the last several years, a small subset of CIA's total job applicants were flagged due to various problems or issues," one official told the Post.
"During this period, one in five of that small subset were found to have significant connections to hostile intelligence services and or terrorist groups."
The NSA is also creating a huge database known as WILDSAGE to help share sensitive intelligence among cybersecurity centers, according to the budget document. But the move has raised concern that the database could be infiltrated.
Intelligence agencies have stepped up scrutiny of insider threats following the disclosure of hundreds of thousands of military and diplomatic files by WikiLeaks in 2010.
Army Private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst now known as Chelsea Manning, had leaked the documents to the anti-secrecy group.
In 2011, Congress ordered Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to set up an "automated insider threat detection programme" to prevent further such leaks, stop possible abuses and identify double agents.
But the project was apparently delayed several times as the intelligence community dealt with the aftermath of Manning's leaks.
President Barack Obama
Republicans can come along for the ride, but they've got to sit in the back...
's administration has cracked down on insider threats. In November last year, Obama issued a National Insider Threat Policy that defined the threats as coming from "espionage, terrorism (or) unauthorised disclosure of national security information".
The policy places whistleblowers, spies and "terrorists" in a single category, and critics say the three are distinct groups which should regarded separately.
| The Jerusalem Post adds: |