[Red State] Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story that was frightening in a couple of aspects. First, it reported that the C.I.A. had sent a top-secret cable to all stations warning them that "troubling" numbers of agents and informants were being rounded up by our opponents and either executed or flipped into double agents.The message, in an unusual top secret cable, said that the C.I.A.’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised. Although brief, the cable laid out the specific number of agents executed by rival intelligence agencies — a closely held detail that counterintelligence officials typically do not share in such cables.Ominously for a story focusing on sloppy handling of secret information, the existence of the cable and its contents only stayed hidden for a few days.
The cable highlighted the struggle the spy agency is having as it works to recruit spies around the world in difficult operating environments. In recent years, adversarial intelligence services in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have been hunting down the C.I.A.’s sources and in some cases turning them into double agents.
Acknowledging that recruiting spies is a high-risk business, the cable raised issues that have plagued the agency in recent years, including poor tradecraft; being too trusting of sources; underestimating foreign intelligence agencies, and moving too quickly to recruit informants while not paying enough attention to potential counterintelligence risks — a problem the cable called placing "mission over security."
The large number of compromised informants in recent years also demonstrated the growing prowess of other countries in employing innovations like biometric scans, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and hacking tools to track the movements of C.I.A. officers in order to discover their sources.
While the C.I.A. has many ways to collect intelligence for its analysts to craft into briefings for policymakers, networks of trusted human informants around the world remain the centerpiece of its efforts, the kind of intelligence that the agency is supposed to be the best in the world at collecting and analyzing.
It has been widely reported that the C.I.A.’s covert networks in Communist China have been largely rolled up. Back in May 2017, the C.I.A. admitted that it had lost at least 18 agents inside of China. The operative word there is "admitted," as the known body count quickly ballooned to at least three dozen. There was a brief spasm of counterintelligence work on our side (see Former C.I.A. Agent Busted for Passing Secrets to China and Arrested C.I.A. Officer Possessed Names of Covert Agents and Sit Down for This One — Former C.I.A. Officer Arrested as Chinese Spy: You’ll Never Guess Who Hired Him) and then things went back to normal, see While Eric Swalwell Was Sleeping With a Chinese Spy Adam Schiff Put Him in Charge of C.I.A. Oversight.
At the same time that Chinese assets were roaming free inside the C.I.A., the C.I.A. ignored the compromise of a communications system that it wished rather than knew or even believed to be secure and that cost at least 30 agents their lives. Yesterday, my colleague Jennifer Van Laar posted on the curious correlation between the loss of most of our covert operatives inside China and Hunter Biden’s bromance with Taiwanese businessman and suspected ChiCom agent Michael Lin. Biden and Lin became business associates, and Lin flew with Biden of Air Force 2. Read Are Hunter Biden’s China Travels With Michael Lin Related to the Loss of 30 C.I.A. Assets? for more details.
To be honest, there are certain cultural challenges.
There are obvious long-term operational security risks involved in running such programs.