Paul Redmond gave this speech at a Central Intelligence Retirees Association (CIRA) even on 4 February 2002:
What I thought I’d talk about today is Counterintelligence and why it’s so hard to do. I’ll give you the benefit of my prejudices. I won’t use the new age term that’s so current in the present Directorate of Operations, in other words I’m not going to “share” anything with you. I’m going to preach to you.
I’ll talk about CI, one half of it, the spy catching part of it, not about the business of operational security. Why is it so hard, why do we find it so hard to catch these bloody spies and why can they work so long and why do they do so much damage. Having worked, drifted into the field through the last third of my career, I was always amazed that we weren’t better at it, because we aren’t dumb. But it seems that we are really bad at it, and I’ve given a lot of thought as to why, and that’s what I thought I’d talk about today.
First of all, a little bit about the reality of the espionage that’s conducted against us. When you look at it historically, every US Government agency since the Cold War started, every US Government agency engaged in national security, has been penetrated, some of them 18 ways to Sunday. The Congress has been penetrated. Defense industries have been penetrated, you all know that, and every single one of the armed services with the exception of maybe the Coast Guard has been penetrated.
Historically, there are some striking facts that ought to have made it clear many years ago that spying could really hurt us. My friends at NSA who pulled together the Venona material that has been published, maintain that when Morgenthau, FDR’s Secretary of the Treasury, came to work during one period of his very long tenure, there was no one in his substantive immediate circle who was not working for the Soviets.
And then in Wellington’s words of a “close run thing,” had Henry Wallace been Vice President instead of Truman when FDR died, Lawrence Duggan probably would have become Secretary of State. Lawrence Duggan was a fully recruited, fully controlled, responsive KBG agent. That ought to have gotten people’s attention. But it apparently hasn’t.
Statistically, by my count and the count of a couple of other people, there are about 95 significant uncovered cases of espionage since 1975 alone. Ninety-five. That’s slightly less than four a year I guess. About a little more that half of them, have involved DOD or the Services or were related to DOD or the Services.
Who’s trying to spy on us? I guess I have to fuzz the numbers. About 80 entities are known to have successfully spied on us in recent years or tried to spy on us. And I hope you noticed I used the word “entity” not governments. Among this number are our old enemies, I won’t bore you with those, you all know them. However, you have to include a number of our “allies”: West Germany, France, Greece.
How about client states: South Korea, Israel, Taiwan, Jordan. South Korea, which would not exist without the United States, and Israel, which in my opinion would_ probably not exist without the United Sates, spy on us in a rather uninhibited way.
Third world countries: the Philippines recruited a CIA employee, I didn’t even know they had an intelligence service. Ecuador, of all places, recruited somebody in DIA. Ghana, of course was involved in the case of Sharon Scranage. That’s the third world.
One of the most striking things that I ever read when 1 was working in the CI Center was about a country that instructed its embassy in this town to recruit CIA. I don’t know that anything happened, but that country has a per capita GNP of $250, per capita annual GNP of $250. They barely have a government much less an intelligence service.
I referred to entities. The Cartels, I’m told, have been successful in getting at technical people in Latin America. The African National Congress had a very good penetration of the State Department and Charles Taylor, who was then a two-bit warlord in Liberia, had a penetration of the State Department.
The FBI, in addition to Hanssen, Pitts, and Miller has been penetrated in the criminal arena probably worse than anywhere else. If you read a book entitled Black Mass about what happened in Boston, the mob, the Irish Mob under Whitey Bulger allegedly recruited a couple of FBI guys up there, special agents. The net result was that Commonwealth of Massachusetts State Police, FBI and Boston police sources into the double digits got whacked. In addition, I’m told, that a mob penetration of the FBI field office in Las Vegas is the Robert Hanssen source equivalent for the mob. The point is everybody is spying.
These agents run too long, and do too much damage. Ames, I guess seven years or so, Hanssen, on and off for 21, Bloch over 15. My point is, you’d think that the American Government would get the point. But we do not seem to get the point. We don’t catch them fast enough, and they do too much damage.
In trying to explain why, I’ll concede right at the beginning that it’s very hard to do because the people who are spying on us, particularly those who did spy on us during the Cold War knew how to keep secrets better than we did. Their compartmentation was amazingly good and even though we had many penetrations, diverse penetrations of those Eastern European and Soviet Services, their compartmentation was so good that we never really had much of a hint. My guess is that probably not more than ten people knew about Ames, maybe another ten people, some of which overlap knew about Hanssen within the working levels of the KGB. So, I’ll concede right up front that it’s hard.
But there are three major factors which make it hard for The United States. There’s the cultural factor, the bureaucratic factor, and a historical factor. I think the root of the problem, and I’m going to belabor this, of why we can’t get this right is that Americans deep down just really don’t like human espionage. I’m not talking about nice people twirling dials at NSA, I’m talking about the dirty business of human espionage.
Americans don’t like it, therefore, they don’t like to think about it, therefore, they like to ignore it, therefore, they don’t want to believe people do it to us.
There’s the old quote you’ve all heard from Mac Bundy’s biography of Secretary of State Stimson “that gentlemen don’t read other gentlemen’s mail.” David Kahn describes Stimson’s view of espionage as a “low snooping activity, a sneaking, spying, keyhole peering kind of dirty business, a violation of the trust upon which he, Stimson conducted both his personal and foreign policy.”
A little bit later, historically, William Bullit, FDR’s then Ambassador to the Soviet Union, said “We should never send another spy to the Soviet Union. There is no weapon at once so disarming, and effective in a relationship with the Communists as sheer, honesty.”
Dr. Schlesinger, who was the DCI at one point, somebody told me recently, forbade senior officers of tl1e Director of Operations to use tl1e term “clandestine service.”
Stansfield Turner, when he was the director, actually tried to shut down a major operation. This was a very productive human operation in a place where it’s very good to have a spy to prevent conflict from happening. He apparently didn’t approve of using a senior military officer of another country for spying. I guess officers don’t spy.
I was at the nice breakfast they give you after appearing on Meet the Press, and Jack Germond, a prominent reporter, was saying that when he was writing a book about George W. Bush’s first election campaign, he had came around to kind of liking Bush until he discovered that Bush was very much liked when he was Director of CIA. And I said, “Well I suppose that meant that you decided he could not be a good person,” and he looked across the table at me and said, “You’re absolutely right.”
Then you get one of the dimmer Republican bulbs in the SSCI saying in a hearing about an overseas operation, “You can’t do that, that’s illegal.” The point is, of course, that if it were legal the State Department could do it.
Kerry of Nebraska, who is actually a good guy, said to me in a hearing, “We can’t trust people like you, you steal things.” And of course, there is Moynihan’s, famous statement, “Secrecy is for losers.” The irony of that is a lot of the people who died on September 11th who voted for him, died as the result of a secret organization being able to mount a secret operation undetected by the United States’ putative secret intelligence services.
And finally, actually not finally, there are a couple of more. One of the great legacies of the Clinton Administration is this new law that you have to reveal everything after 20 or 25 years. I believe that will kill the espionage capability of this country.
I cite Ernie Mays famous quote, “Intelligence agencies have ceased to be secret. The news media provide more information ·about tl1e CIA than even about the State Department and such genuinely secretive agencies as the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget.”
Also I note Tony Lake’s statement to one of the best officers in the history of the DO. Lake, who was preparing not to become DCI as it turned out, went around the agency soliciting the opinion of, in this case, a retired senior officer. He asked this retired senior DO officer, “What could I do to help?” This wonderful senior officer said, “Well people like you, Mr. Lake, might give us some public support once in awhile.” And Lake said, “Well, I couldn’t do that.”
And finally, since I’ve been beating up on everybody except the Agency, I should note that during the early 90s we were all ordered in stages to go to some resort type place in the desert. Several groups of officers in succession went to this place with facilitators and when you weren’t sitting in hot tubs writing poetry, you were supposed to be, I’m not kidding, you were supposed to be formulating a mission statement for the DO, post Cold War.
The final, most senior group got down there, the big shots, division chiefs and higher, and was supposed to ratify the mission statement. The one master spy in the crowd who knew what he was doing, Burton Gerber, looked at the text composed by the three or four previous groups from the DO. Burton looked hard at the mission statement and the word “espionage” was no where to be found.
So my point is that culturally we deep down really don’t like this espionage business. We’re probably the only major power that does not view espionage as a valid, effective way to promote its own interests.
Now, why am I talking about espionage, it’s not counter intelligence, catching spies. The point is, counter intelligence, counter espionage is even worse than espionage. It’s more secret, more conspiratorial, it’s more untrusting, it’s even less nice than espionage and incredibly much more un-American, because it’s really not nice. And that’s my basic point. It’s not a nice thing to do, therefore, Americans don’t like it.
Well, you think that I’m making this up. I’ll read this great quote from Eric Ambler. “I think if asked to single out one specific group of men, one type, one category as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without any hesitation the people who run counter espionage departments.”
You probably think I’m making it up but my great friend Milt Bearden, head of CE Division after Burton, when I was trying to persuade him that there was a spy in the bloody place, said to me with that baton he used to wave around, “Redmond, I came to work in CIA to work against people who think like you do.”
In addition to not liking the espionage and the counterespionage business and what it requires, Americans are sort of naive and there’s a bit of moral ambiguity in a lot of us. There are a couple of really good quotes. Ambassador Joseph E. Davies, 20 February 1946, from Moscow, “The Soviets had a moral right to resort to espionage to procure the atomic secrets. Our refusal to give the bomb to the Soviets was a hostile act.”
In February 1997, the Boston Globe had a stringer wandering around North Carolina where Felix Bloch retired. The stringer from The Globe interviewed the guy who is sort of the head of the retiree organization of the Foreign Service down there and he talked about Felix and the quote from the article is, “Many of his former colleagues decided to give Felix the benefit of the doubt since he was never indicted, let alone convicted. He participated in one of our Foreign Service day reunions. Then Felix ran afoul of the law again and I haven’t any contact with him since.” Bloch had been arrested for shoplifting. My line there is “well they do have some standards.”
At least the Foreign Service Officer did not cite Anthony Blunt’s press conference statement justifying his spying when he quoted E M Forster as saying, “That if he, Forster, had to choose between betraying a friend and his country he’d hope he had the guts to betray his country.”
The point is we don’t like the espionage business and the counterespionage business and try to ignore it and avoid it, and there is also this stream of kind of ambiguity and I would just say naivete, to put it mildly, that makes catching spies hard to do.
All this was exacerbated by the end of the Cold War. There were some nice people around who seemed to think that spying against us, in this context, only happened because the “Commies” were over there.
DIA gave badges to uniformed Soviet military, Russian by then, military attaches, no-escort badges, to the Pentagon. DIA tried to make us apologize for trying to recruit a GRU officer in Latin America.
The State Department via John Deutsch kept David Cohen and myself in the office once practically all night writing talking points for use in apologizing for another recruitment attempt.
Milt blew his top at me because somebody tried to recruit a KGB officer in Latin America.
The then head of the Soviet, the Central Eurasian Division, or whatever they called it, tried to do away with the restricted handling of traffic, because the Cold War was over.
And my favorite quote of all from this period was related to the Greek-American Steven Lalas, a State Department employee who was spying for the Greeks. The Bureau did a brilliant job of wrapping him up. The Justice Department briefed the then relatively new, Attorney General Janet Reno that there would be an arrest very soon and a major prosecution. Her reaction was, “Why is this going on, the Cold War is over?”
It had nothing to do with the Cold War. It was a putative NATO ally running a penetration of the US Government. Culturally, we just don’t get it.
The second factor is the bureaucratic problem, the bureaucratic context of why this is so hard to do. There’s a story that I was told that may be apocryphal. We had quiet relationship with the KGB for a while in the years during the Cold War to exchange views: we won’t kidnap you if you won’t drug us and where are our defectors, etc.
In one of the last sessions, Kireyev was there. He was the head of counterintelligence. He was needled by the CIA participant saying he looked like hell: “Anatoly Tikonovich, you must to be on top of the world because you’re wrapping up all our spies.” Kireyev did look like hell, he was in very poor health and he said, “But you know, any counterintelligence success is bad news.”
That’s sort of a funny story, but it’s really true. Somebody always gets hurt when there’s a counterintelligence success.
There was Conrad who was an enlisted man in the US Army. When he was uncovered it was really bad news for all those guys, who by that time were general officers who had been majors and colonels and who had written fitness reports that Conrad was probably the best NCO in the division.
While the Ames case was a counterintelligence success, I would maintain it was a total disaster for the Agency and the aftermath did more damage than Ames.
Also in the bureaucratic context, since its so hard and it’s always such bad news, the top bureaucrats don’t want to hear it. During the Ames case, I had to coddle some senior officers who thought that Ames’ money probably came from emeralds from Columbia. As Oscar Wilde said, “The original sin of those in power is wishful thinking.”
Then there’s the other part, that is perhaps the most pernicious. It’s always hard and since it’s not nice, since it’s not going to help your career, CI is always somebody else’s job.
The CI Center established a wonderful institution where each operating division of the DO had to have within it a CI component. The head of it, the branch, if you will, essentially reported to the head of the Counterintelligence Center but had to maintain his/her welcome within the division. Their job is to make sure they don’t do stupid things. The CI representatives try to keep them out of trouble.
The default by most Americans will be to do it wrong, in my view, in the espionage area. An individual who was then head of a division called me up one day, we were having a hard finding an individual to run the CI branch in the division. He said to me, “Redmond, I found a really good candidate who will do a really good job for you.” I said, “No, no, it’s for you, to keep you out of trouble.” He still didn’t get it.
So culturally it’s not nice, bureaucratically it’s inconvenient, and historically it’s been a sine wave of, I would maintain, farcical reactions, overreactions, silence and then overreactions again. Spy mania, spies caught in a great hullabaloo, outrage, dumb legislation, and silence until the next time.
Everybody here lived through the Angleton era, so I won’t bore you with that, but mind you, that was, to some degree, although in a muted way, a certain kind of hysteria. Too much counterintelligence. Colby, then destroyed the counterintelligence capability of the Agency. Takes the Agency into what I call the broad, sunlit, la la land, where you don’t need counterintelligence. I have a quote from something Mr. Colby said or wrote, “CIA does not need a large CI organization. Every case officer will be his own CI officer.”
In addition, the Church and Pike committees were doing their work. My view is that the direct result of this overreaction to Angleton was the Cuban fiasco, to some degree the East German situation. The overreaction of Church/Pike and all that and hysteria from the media, their treatment of that era and overreaction to it, led to it taking so long to catch Ames.
It’s always been a puzzle to me that why, starting in the mid-eighties, there wasn’t a more effective effort mounted to figure out why we were losing all the cases. There was a massive amount of work done in an analytical way but it was mostly directed towards analyzing cases.
With a few minor exceptions, there was no real look at the people in the DO and SE, in particular, who knew of those cases. And I’ve wondered why. I think it was because by that stage there was a reaction to the beating we took. After Angleton there was a disinclination to investigate people. I said in the mid-eighties to the ADDO that we ought to polygraph every blanking person who knows of these cases. He said, “No we can’t, we’d get sued.”
So, my point is, is that because of reaction to the overreaction to the Angleton time, our counterespionage efforts to investigate what ended up being Ames were not effective because we were inhibited. That’s my view, now many years later. Also, it’s my contention at this stage, that what I call the post Ames festivities did more damage to the DO and the Agency than Ames did himself.
You have Glickman, the Chairman of HPSCI agreeing in public with Ames’ criticisms of CIA. Connie Chung, gave Ames a big hug in the Alexandria jail after her interview. Leo Hazelwood who was then the EXDIR made us all wear badges saying, “Never Again.” I asked him “Does that mean that we should never catch a spy again or they’ll never be another spy?” I never got an answer.
Jim Woolsey was told by a senator, “Why don’t you just fire the first two or three people through the door?” Jim’s reaction, as only Jim could make it was, “What happens if it happens to be the three people who caught him?” That was the atmosphere.
Then there was some of the other nonsense that went on. Congress couldn’t understand why we didn’t catch Ames because he owned a Jaguar. There were six or seven other Jaguar’s in the compound at the time. There was one other white one like his, we call that, by the way, CI “by Cadillac.”
David Major who does some great work in this area, reminded me that the spy Dunlop assigned to a NSA drove a Cadillac. So NSA, in it’s infinite wisdom investigated every NSA employee who drove a Cadillac. I’m telling you all these funny stories but the point is the reactions to these cases are usually irrational and dumb.
So we have a flap, everybody bloviates, has a good time, then they forget about it, and nobody learns a bloody thing. Except I think the Agency learned a little bit after Ames. The State Department certainly didn’t learn anything after Ames.
The FBI didn’t learn anything, and I commend to your attention an unclassified report, that is an unclassified executive summary of something called the Bromwich Report which is the Justice Department’s IG report of the FBI’s performance in the Ames case. It showed beyond a doubt that in the mid-90s that there was no compartmentatioo in the FBI.
Theo we come to the next flap, which I call the W88 flap (can’t call it Wen Ho Lee only anymore) and the lost and found hard drives. I remind you that the Cox report after that was bipartisan. A former ranking member of the HPSCI called the W88 affair “One of the worst CI failures in the nation’s history.” The Chairman of Energy and Natural Resources which controls most of the DOE said, “What has happened is a disaster of major proportions to our national security.”
We had the usual standard reaction, fire a bunch of people, talk about polygraphing 13,000 people. Billy Richardson then says everything’s fine. Then silence. In July 2001 there is talk about the budget, too much security in DOE, talk of introducing legislation against the polygraph. I’m sort of an expert on this and frankly security and counterintelligence in the weapons labs at DOE is probably worse now than it was before the W88/hard drives flaps.
Then Hanssen comes along. Hanssen is too recent to talk about except that the flap over Hanssen was a little muted because I think most of the politicians are a little afraid of the Bureau, probably for good reason. But Freeh follows the pattern, polygraph everybody, etc. etc.
So there we are, we have a cultural disaffinity toward doing the work. Bureaucratically, it’s really inconvenient and our reactions to these situations are at best, juvenile.
If you agree with my premise, the root of this problem is that we really don’t like human espionage because human espionage is yucky, then the rest of it, counterespionage is even worse and we really don’t like it.
But I would posit that we will never get any better at this until we have another real Pearl Harbor and I don’t think that September 11th was a real Pearl Harbor. So we’re headed for more spies who work too long and do too much damage.
Thank you.