HUMINT, Human Intelligence

The CIA admitted to losing dozens of informants around the world, as some have been imprisoned or killed.   AP

"Sometimes there are things beyond our control, but there are also occasions of sloppiness and neglect and people in senior positions are never held responsible."

"Do your job and don't be lazy. It's a willingness to say we are not as perfect we think we are. That's a positive thing.No one at the end of the day is being held responsible when things go south with an agent,”\"

Douglas London, former agency operative

The elite corps of American counterintelligence officials are concerned and they have reason to be. The most successful sources of intelligence are those who are embedded within the source of interest. When individuals can be persuaded that it is in their interests to spy on their own countries' politicians, military and intelligence agencies and convey secret information to someone who acts as their agent, whether persuaded for ideological, sympathetic or pecuniary interests, the intelligence derived from such sources are the most insider-valuable.

When such operatives are counter-persuaded by their own intelligence services to continue to act as though they are secretly involved in spying for a foreign nation, but in fact pick up valuable information to pass on to their own national intelligence services, that's a double-loss for the original intelligence agency. They have lost a valuable informant, and that informant has in turn betrayed the source that convinced them to betray their country. They become a source of identifying other Humint agents and consequences flow.

The CIA, hugely dependent on intelligence brought to them by suborned insider informants began to realize that China was imprisoning and even killing Chinese citizens who had agreed to provide classified Chinese information to them either for financial gain or having been persuaded ideologically to betray their country. And nor is China the only country that has managed to infiltrate a system that convinces nationals to betray their own nation.

 

Members of the Taliban at the former C.I.A. Eagle Base in Kabul in September. The agency has devoted much of its attention for the last two decades to terrorist threats and the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, but improving intelligence collection on adversaries like China and Russia is once again a centerpiece of its agenda.  Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Recently officials in the CIA issued a warning to every one of its stations and bases globally, alerting them to the fact that an alarming number of informers recruited from other nations to spy for the United States were captured or killed. That the top-secret cable was leaked by those knowledgeable of its contents and the matter it highlighted is yet another symptom that all is not as it should be within the agency. 

 

Dozens of instances of foreign informants killed, arrested or compromised over the past several years has clearly alarmed the counterintelligence mission center of the C.I.A. The highly classified brief cable meant for internal eyes only laid out specific numbers of agents executed by adversarial counterintelligence services in countries such as China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan where C.I.A. sources have been hunted down, many transformed into double agents.

Such troubling and  highly secret details are not meant to meet the public eye, highlighting as they do a state of poorly-performing tradecraft, uncertain yet trusted sources; underestimation of foreign intelligence agencies' resourcefulness, and assuming too much in swiftly accepting recruits as informants, failing to pay sufficient attention to the potential for counterintelligence risks.

The sheer number of compromised informants recently demonstrates amply the increasing professionalism of other countries in their use of innovative techniques such as biometric scans, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and tracking the movements of C.I.A. officers by hacking tools, for the purpose of discovering sources. In other words, the performance of C.I.A. agents appears to be compromised by their own unfounded opinion of their superiority over their intelligence-gathering counterparts.

Case officers earn promotions through their performance in recruiting new informants. Frontline spies are anxious to earn promotions. Taking necessary precautions to ensure that reliable counterintelligence ensues is not rewarded. And so, the cable emphasized to C.I.A. case officers they should be focusing not merely on recruiting but on security issues including adequately vetting informants with a view of evading adversarial intelligence services. Ensuring that reliable operations ensue appears to be an expendable afterthought since promotions are not  typically based on such indexes as for example, discerning whether an informant really may be working for another country.

A 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.  Credit...Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press

Finally, perhaps reluctantly, the memo hinted at agency underestimation of its antagonist counterparts in the belief that its officers and tradecraft are superior to those of other intelligence services. And having to finally admit to themselves that other intelligence services targeted by the U.S. are just as skilled in hunting down informants. And then there is the issue of American agencies for whom intelligence gathering is primary and who fail impressively to monitor their own decision-making.

In particular, the decisions made by the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the U.S. Department of the Interior to avail themselves of drones manufactured in China. At the very time that the United States frowns on nations in its democratic orbit acquiring Chinese-produced technology, warning of Beijing's call to all its nationals, including those living and doing business abroad, of their loyalty obligation to the Chinese Communist Party, it is inexplicable that these intelligence-gathering agencies would compromise themselves in this way.

If Huawei Communications, the flagship darling of communications technology for China is viewed as an intelligence threat that must be kept out of Western nations' 5G communications upgrades to ensure that Beijing cannot continue business as usual in infiltration of the West and securing government, military and trade secrets, why the neglect on drones made in China with the very same information-gathering potential?

Infamously, all countries spy on each other. Poking into other countries' politics, militaries, academia, science and technology, business interests, social and cultural issues. Some far more deeply than others. China in particular is known for its habit of lifting classified information from government sources by compromising technological devices with AI, along with encouraging their expatriates living abroad to be involved in local and federal politics, business, cultural events, and university teaching positions. 

"Given everything we know about the Chinese Communist Party and its companies, there is absolutely no excuse for any [American] government agency to use DJI drones, or any other drones manufactured in countries identified as national security threats."

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Vice Chairman, Senate Intelligence Committee

Chinese police send a box via drone in a photo op on March 9, 2021 in Zhoushan, Zhejiang, China. The Secret Service and FBI purchased 27 drones from Da Jing Information (DJI), a Chinese Communist Party controlled manufacturer that sits on a Trump-era Department of Commerce Entity List. (Image: TPG/Getty Images)