(Sorta) Secret Agent Men
In the Marvel comics universe there's a "secret" organization called S.H.I.E.L.D. Back in my day that stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law Enforcement Division, though as Marvel founder Stan Lee once noted, no one ever came up with an answer for what it was a division of. In more recent times the agency was renamed to stand for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage and Logistics Directorate. What became a sort of subtle joke over the years was that for an agency that was supposed to be super-secret, as in the CIA being relatively high profile, it seemed that everyone knew about them.
All of this is back on my mind both because the agency figures prominently in the current run of Captain America, which I'm catching up on in a sudden gulp and plan to get in another entry... soon - whatever that means.
It's also partially because of this report of a Chicago reporter compiled a listing of 2600 CIA operatives using Web resources.
It's not as dire as it at first seems, but it's still troubling. Moreover, I'm concerned that even if it's not the intent of the reporter that this will become part of the evidence being used to reduce public concerns about the gravity of the Valerie Plame leak.
Because I don't know how quickly it'll disappear into the Chicago Tribune "subscriber only" or - worse - paid archive searches, I'm reprinting the article below with absolutely no authorization. (Oh, God! The Power! This must be what it's like to be Dick Cheney!)
TRIBUNE INVESTIGATION
Internet blows CIA cover
It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you need to know is how to navigate the Internet.
By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
Published March 12, 2006
WASHINGTON -- She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online services that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA, her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.
Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees working overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have "horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.
"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age," said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things that worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our officers who are doing dangerous work."
Dyck declined to detail the remedies "since we don't want the bad guys to know what we're fixing."
Several "front companies" set up to provide cover for CIA operatives and the agency's small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the Internet, following the Tribune's disclosures that some of the planes were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they claimed to have been tortured.
Although finding and repairing the vulnerabilities in the CIA's cover system was not a priority under Goss' predecessor, George Tenet, one senior U.S. official observed that "the Internet age didn't get here in 2004," the year Goss took over at the CIA.
CIA names not disclosed
The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA employees uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or other details that might put agency employees or operatives at risk. The CIA apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees were in the public domain until being provided with a partial list of names by the Tribune.
At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing enough to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the Tribune search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the list.
Covert employees discovered
But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that could make them terrorist targets.
Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Most are in northern Virginia, within a few miles of the agency's headquarters. Several are in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. There is one in Chicago.
Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the CIA.
A senior U.S. official, reacting to the computer searches that produced the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do this, but the Chinese could."
Down on `The Farm'
For decades the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near historic Williamsburg, remained the deepest of secrets. Even after former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s the agency never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel persisted in referring to it in conversation only as "The Farm."
But an online search for the term "Camp Peary" produced the names and other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off from Camp Peary's small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership and flight histories could also be traced.
Although the Tribune's initial search for "Central Intelligence Agency" employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers, other Internet-based services provide, usually for a fee but sometimes for free, the home addresses and telephone numbers of U.S. residents, as well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and work.
Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their way into the public domain, the senior U.S. intelligence official replied that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."
The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that "individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just stupid."
One senior U.S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign operatives with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.
Coverts especially important
And yet, experts say, covert operatives who pose as something other than diplomats are becoming increasingly important in the global war on terror.
"In certain areas you just can't collect the kind of information you need in the 21st Century by working out of the embassy. They're just not going to meet the kind of people they need to meet," said Melvin Goodman, who was a senior Soviet affairs analyst at the CIA for more than 20 years before he retired.
The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover" operator, or NOC--as was attempted with Valerie Plame--creates vulnerabilities that are not difficult to spot later on.
The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name . . . and find out all sorts of holes?"
In Plame's case, online computer searches would have turned up her tenure as a junior diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Athens even after she began passing herself off as a privately employed "energy consultant."
The solution, Goodman suggested, is to create NOCs at the very outset of their careers, "taking risks with younger people, worrying about the reputation of people before they have one. Or create one."
Shortage of `mentors'
But that approach also has a downside, in that "you're getting into the problem of very junior, inexperienced people, which a lot of veteran CIA people feel now is part of the problem. Porter Goss has to double the number of operational people in an environment where there are no mentors. Who's going to train these people?"
In addition to stepping up recruiting, Goss has ordered a "top-down" review of the agency's "tradecraft" following the disclosure that several supposedly covert operatives involved in the 2003 abduction of a radical Muslim preacher in Milan, Italy, had registered at hotels under their true names and committed other amateurish procedural violations that made it relatively easy for the Italian police to identify them and for Italian prosecutors to charge them with kidnapping.
Comments
I think about that sometimes, and I wonder just how far we've fallen in the international intelligence rankings since 1974. I cannot imagine anyone still thinks of U.S. intelligence gathering as being only sixth in the world. So, stuff like this really doesn't surprise me.
What makes it all worse is that, whatever the relative effectiveness and efficiency of our intelligence gathering operation, none of it matters while we have people in power who don't want to listen to anything that doesn't fit their predetermined agenda.
Heinlein used to like to say that there is nothing more expensive than the second best military in the world. How much more wasteful, then, is the 30th best intelligence gathering operation... in an Administration where even on the rare occasions they get it right in a timely fashion, nobody wants to bother listening?
It honestly astonishes me that Al Qaeda hasn't managed to blow something REALLY BIG up in America since 9/11. I swear to God, these guys must be more incompetent than Hydra or the HIVE.
We've gotten away with these operations for so long because we're almost too big of a target. Also, the fear of what would happen as reprisals was high enough to keep most in line, and those with the resources to mount something really devastating - until relatively recent times - generally were economically developed and connected enough to either be simultaneously harmed or such obvious benefactors that they may as well paint a bullseye on themselves and mail in a confession.
Mankind's technology has recently given small groups and even individuals the ability to cause devastation previously reserved to countries, and it's all so much more complicated. The greatest connection of security and quality of life will come when nearly everyone has a vested interest in the way things are. Lacking that, and in the meantime, the only tools those in power and the position of Having are likely to see are greater surveillance and harsher penalties.
The latter's fine - within reason - but is likely to have little impact since so much of the problem is coming from irrational fanatics.
The former's the one that worries me most. An ongoing trend away from privacy in the name of security, complete with the attitudes that this is "a different world" and that various notions of freedom are outmoded.
Still, I must admit there are times when I wish we could put a little more of the spook back in the CIA. A huge part of what has made the Mossad (Israeli intelligence) as effective as it is is that everyone has the expectation that they will react swiftly and with a more devastating blow than was dealt them. The trick's in trusting any group of people with that sort of power.
...and if that doesn't neatly bring us full circle to an issue where reality and the world of comic book universes thematically overlap, then I don't know what does.