In article <bfmteg$a3b$1@pencil.math.missouri.edu>, Starman says...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0307.marshall.html
July/August 2003 	
Counterintelligent
How the GOP keeps the FBI stupid. 
By Joshua Micah Marshall 
			
In March, 2003, the FBI arrested a Chinese-American businesswoman and
Republican fundraiser, alleging that she had passed a frighteningly
broad range of American intelligence secrets to the People's Republic
of China (PRC). For two decades, Katrina Leung had been a paid bureau
informant, supplying information on Chinese intelligence operations in
America. She'd also been sleeping with two senior FBI agents--one of
whom was her so-called "handler"--for the better part of those two
decades. It was alleged that she had transmitted what she learned
about American counterintelligence from her lovers to Beijing and sent
Beijing's disinformation back through the FBI. The story was sordid,
embarrassing, and, worse than that, quite grave: Intelligence sources
told The Washington Post that Leung had single-handedly compromised 20
years of American counter-intelligence work against the PRC. 
Democrats, who in 1997 weathered endless--and ultimately
unproven--accusations of selling political favors or national security
secrets for PRC money, can take a measure of satisfaction from this
unlikely coda: The only bonafide Chinese spy so far turns out to have
been not only a Republican, but a well-connected GOP fundraiser. And
not just any Republican fundraiser, but one who happened to be
sleeping with one of the lead FBI agents investigating Democratic
fundraising. 
It's bad enough that Leung was able to seduce two FBI agents. But her
longtime handler and lover, James Smith, was in possession of
information covering a wide range of investigations and operations
aimed at the PRC. Since Smith had access to so much, and Leung had
access to what Smith had (copying and returning documents from his
briefcase before he noticed their absence), her treachery touched
everything: the 1997 campaign finance scandal, the investigation of
Wen Ho Lee (the Chinese scientist at Los Alamos who was once suspected
of selling nuclear secrets to Beijing), investigations of spies at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and much more. "They lost
everything," one hawkish D.C.-based China watcher told me. "It's not
how big a fish she is; it's how much damage did she do to the system
over 20 years. She totally wrecked it." The real lesson that the
Katrina Leung case teaches is one that the FBI and the Republicans,
who became its most aggressive patrons during the 1990s, have spent
almost two decades ignoring: The repeated failure of the FBI to adopt
basic counterintelligence tactics has left it wide open to moles and
spies. 

>From time to time, every spy agency falls victim to a mole, a traitor,

or a double agent. It's in the nature of the enterprise, since each
such institution constantly attempts to penetrate the secrets of
almost every other intelligence service. But because intelligence
professionals know that it is extremely difficult to guard against
every compromise of an agency's secrets, they are supposed to
structure their outfits in such a way as to minimize the damage when
the inevitable breach occurs. The best way to do that is through what
intelligence professionals call "compartmentation"--designing the
organization like a honeycomb, with individual parts sealed off from
the rest as much as possible, and distributing information within the
organization only on a "need to know" basis. There's always a tension
between the needs for compartmentation and information sharing. But
without effective compartmentation, a single, well-placed mole can
trigger an intelligence leak of catastrophic proportions. Poor
compartmentation also makes finding the culprit almost impossible. 

If the Leung scandal were a one-time goof, it might not be so
outrageous. But it's not. The problems it exposed bear striking
similarities to those revealed in the investigations into the
Soviet-controlled American spies Aldrich Ames and Robert
Hanssen--problems of information security about which the bureau had
been repeatedly warned, but had just as often failed to address. This
is no insignificant bureaucratic rigidity. Some of the country's most
important national security secrets over the last 20 years have been
exposed to our two biggest adversaries, and finding the culprits has
been long delayed because of the bureau's failure to effectively
implement this most basic principle of intelligence work. Despite no
fewer than five very public warnings, Washington has been chronically
unwilling to fix it. 
These repeated, dangerous failures at the FBI have both administrative
and political sources. Bureaucratically, the agency is being asked to
undertake two incompatible responsibilities: law enforcement and
intelligence work. Though the two activities are related and
overlapping, the skills, strategies, and tactics needed for each are
profoundly different. The skills needed for law enforcement--a clubby
culture of sharing information among agents--often means disaster in
intelligence work. The latest debacle is proof that the bureau has
never, and can never, overcome this built-in conflict in its mission.
Only changing the FBI's mission can solve the problem. But only
politicians can change the bureau's mission, and that's the second,
more disturbing source of the problem. For the bureau's serial
failures have been revealed at a time when Republicans have been
tightening their hold on power in Washington--including on the
congressional committees that oversee the FBI. Equally important, it
has been during this period that the GOP has chosen to act as the
FBI's protector, encouraging its investigations of the Buddhist-temple
affair and other "scandals" which hurt the Democrats, while shielding
the FBI from tough but necessary reforms that might have stopped the
real damage done by spies like Leung. 
Many of these problems festered during the Clinton years. And thus
some measure of the responsibility must, by definition, fall on the
former president's shoulders. But his ability to impose reforms on the
FBI was stymied by numerous politically inspired investigations which
would have made any pressure from the White House appear politically
motivated. The Republicans decided not to act because, for them, the
politics were just too good. 

The Hoover Vacuum 
The FBI has always been deeply resistant to reform. During the 1950s
and 1960s, under J. Edgar Hoover, the agency routinely spied on
American citizens--eventually surveilling and compiling dossiers on a
good bulk of the American political, entertainment, and literary
establishments. Congressional oversight was virtually non-existent;
and the FBI mostly did as it pleased. But after Watergate, a
prevailing climate for reform did develop, and the Church Committee
report reined in the FBI, bringing about a sharp limitation in its
powers of domestic surveillance--proof, say law enforcement experts on
all sides of the political spectrum, that the FBI can be reformed,
when there is the political will to do it. 
But there was one crucial, structural problem the Church Committee
didn't fix: the conflict between law-enforcement and intelligence. The
key differences between police work and intelligence work are rooted
in their divergent attitudes toward suspicion and information-sharing.
And the law-enforcement attitude suffuses the culture of the FBI,
because the bureau has always been dominated by its agents--their
specific designation, with intentional grandiloquence, is "special
agent." Once a recruit attains this rank he or she is a member of a
brotherhood. And the bureau has been notoriously unwilling to suspect
its own of such serious transgressions as treason, espionage, or even
serious malfeasance. 
That is precisely the opposite of what is required of an intelligence
agency. Though esprit de corps is undoubtedly important, intelligence
agencies are supposed to operate on a principle of suspicion. No one
is ever truly above doubt. The bureau has historically prided itself
on a culture of gun-toting and case-cracking. The more sedentary,
information-intensive side of law-enforcement--increasingly important
to law enforcement today, but always a mainstay of intelligence
work--has long been shortchanged. What the FBI calls "intelligence
analysts" are more like researchers assigned to special agents running
cases--a low-status position indeed within that proud, macho,
knock-down-the-door organization. As the bureau jibe has it, real men
don't type. 
Finally, law enforcement places a far higher priority on the fast and
easy exchange of information within the police brotherhood. The FBI
"is a culture that prized sharing information, not compartmenting it,"
says Gregory Treverton, a former Church Committee staffer who served
as vice chair of the National Intelligence Council in the early 1990s.
After all, that's how cases get cracked, but not how traitors get
found--it just makes traitors' work easier. And it has simply proven
impossible to maintain one modus operandi on one front of the
organization and a different one on the other. This is especially so
since there will always be more law-enforcement professionals in the
FBI than intelligence and counter-intelligence operatives. And,
consequently, in institutional terms, the former will always dominate
the bureau's leadership and set the organization's tone. 

Mountains and Mole Spills 
In 1985 and 1986, the American intelligence community had a serious
problem on its hands: a series of American informants in Russia run by
both the CIA and the FBI disappeared, only to turn up dead or in
prison. Though most people think of the CIA as the agency that handles
overseas espionage, the FBI has also long conducted espionage against
foreign countries. And it is the FBI's responsibility, as the nation's
chief law enforcement agency, to conduct criminal investigations of
all breaches of American intelligence, whether they occur at the FBI,
the CIA, or elsewhere in the intelligence community. So, after the
disappearance of the Soviet informants, the FBI organized a task force
to discover how U.S. intelligence assets in the Soviet Union had been
compromised. The evidence strongly indicated that at least one spy was
well-placed within the U.S. intelligence community. By 1988, the
bureau's counterespionage branch had concluded that a mole was the
only credible answer. But, where? 
Unfortunately, the FBI's investigation could hardly get off the
ground. The FBI was so poorly compartmented that just in the
Washington field office hundreds of people, from senior staff down to
secretaries, knew information that made its way into Soviet hands.
That lack of compartmentation not only ensured that a mole would have
had access to a very broad range of classified information, it also
greatly complicated the task of looking for and detecting such a mole.
For this and other reasons, the FBI's investigations--of the CIA and
of itself--eventually ground to a halt. Nor did the bureau, or its
overseers on the Hill, make any attempt to remedy the underlying
problem of lax compartmentation--both in the Washington field office
and elsewhere within the bureau--which its own investigation had
uncovered. 
The investigation was moribund until 1991, when the CIA uncovered
financial information which suggested the mole might be Aldrich Ames,
once head of the CIA counterintelligence office in Moscow, who had
been living far beyond his means. The CIA called in the FBI, who
looked through the bank records and eventually arrested Ames as a spy.
Ames pled guilty; over the course of eight years, he'd sold out dozens
of American informants, including General Dmitri Polyakov of Soviet
military intelligence, widely considered one of the CIA's most useful
agents ever. Ames was paid a total of $4.6 million by his Moscow
handlers for his espionage, and is currently serving a life sentence
in federal prison. 
In 1996, two years after Ames's arrest, Justice Department Inspector
General Michael Bromwich set out to discover why it had taken some
eight years for the FBI to arrest Ames when simple bank statements,
open high living, and other readily available evidence seemed to point
so clearly to his guilt. Bromwich found that from the start the bureau
leadership had turned the investigation over to relatively low-level
agents, given the investigation indifferent attention, and allowed it
to break down entirely at several points without coming up with any
reason for the disasters. 
But there was more. Bromwich found that the FBI had not only been
seriously deficient in scrutinizing its own agents, it had also fallen
down at even some of the most basic, established methods of
counterintelligence work. Bromwich's investigators found that the
bureau's Counter-Intelligence Division practiced little of the
compartmentation which is the sine qua non of serious intelligence
work. According to Bromwich's report, "as many as 250 FBI employees at
the FBI's Washington Field Office alone likely had knowledge" of the
key information in question. The FBI wasn't responsible for Ames's
treachery--that was the fault of the CIA--but problems at the FBI
prevented the bureau from uncovering it for years. 
The Bromwich Report was a crucial, and very public, criticism of the
ways in which the FBI was run, but neither the FBI itself nor its
political overseers on Capitol Hill took action. The politics of the
time dictated that neither Democrats nor Republicans were willing to
censure the FBI, a result of the careful political position that FBI
Director Louis Freeh had carved out for himself since his appointment
four years earlier. In 1993, then-President Clinton had promoted
Freeh, a judge, one-time FBI agent, and registered Republican, to
replace the FBI chief Clinton had inherited from the Bush
administration, William Sessions. Freeh stepped into a treacherous
political climate. Republicans were incensed at the FBI for their
ill-conceived--and deadly--1992 raid on the Ruby Ridge, Idaho, cabin
of armed white separatist Randy Weaver. Even worse for Republican
critics of the FBI was the mishandled 51-day federal standoff with
David Koresh and his Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, which ended
with 80 dead when the cultists burnt their own compound to the ground.
Seventy-six cultists were killed, along with the four federal agents
killed in the original raid. The FBI was also facing a different, more
critical Republican party in the mid-1990s, filled with figures like
Helen Chenowith, the then-Idaho congresswoman given to dark mutterings
about black helicopters. Then, in 1994, Republicans took over
Congress, so all of that built-up hostility to the agency now sat in
the seats of power. 
Facing this potential onslaught, Freeh made a tacit arrangement with
the new Republican barons on the hill, as David Plotz of Slate and
others have written. Freeh would focus on multiple investigations of
his nominal bosses in the Clinton administration--Whitewater, Henry
Cisneros, Mike Espy, Vince Foster--in exchange for a free pass on his
and the bureau's many failings. That left problems in
counter-intelligence free of either internal or congressional
scrutiny. If Clinton administration officials were alarmed about the
FBI's compartmentation problems and had plans to fix it--and it's not
clear that they were--there was little they could do because of the
Republican power on the Hill. Any attempt to rein in the bureau would
be seen as an effort to stymie those investigations. In that climate
of malign neglect, the bureau's ills were allowed to fester. 
The failure of the FBI or Congress to act on the recommendations of
the Bromwich Report enabled the career of yet another damaging spy,
FBI counterintelligence agent Robert Hanssen, who'd worked as deputy
director of the bureau's office of Soviet counterintelligence and FBI
liaison to the State Department. He spent two decades pinpointing
American informants for Soviet counterintelligence, in exchange for
diamonds and cash. By the time he was finally caught, in March, 2001,
he'd helped Russian intelligence capture more than 50 American
informants. 
But the problems which allowed Hanssen to elude capture for so long
must have been familiar to FBI leadership. Hanssen was able to supply
secrets from all sorts of FBI intelligence and counterintelligence
operations because the FBI had still not erected any effective
barriers to cross-department information sharing. Sitting at his own
computer terminal, Hanssen had unrestricted and untracked access to
the whole FBI data system--including details on the mole hunt
operation which ended up capturing him. Given his high rank in the
bureau's counterintelligence operations against the Soviet Union, even
very tight compartmentation would have allowed him access to a good
deal of information. But laxity in compartmentation allowed him free
access to all manner of information his proper duties gave him no need
to see. That flaw delayed his eventual capture for years. And his
efforts to gain access to such information should themselves have
raised immediate red flags. If the FBI had taken to heart the
recommendations of the Bromwich Report in 1997, it is quite likely
Hanssen's final phase of spying never would have occurred. But even
after the FBI caught Hanssen, neither the White House nor the
Republican leadership in Congress pressed the FBI into making belated
reforms. 
Then came September 11, and with it sudden pressure from the media,
the public, and politicians to find out why the intelligence community
hadn't anticipated the strikes. Attention quickly focused on the
failure of different branches of the intelligence community to share
information. If FBI agents in Minnesota had reports of suspicious
Arabs taking flying lessons, and so did agents in Florida, why hadn't
that information been compiled centrally? The narrative that developed

>from the September 11 investigations held that the intelligence

community needed to break down barriers and share information more
readily and rapidly. 
But that impulse heightened an existing tension. The lesson from
September 11 was that the intelligence community needed to do a better
job of sharing information. But the lesson from the Ames, Hanssen, and
Leung scandals was that the FBI needed to establish serious
need-to-know criteria. Last year, a joint working group of the Senate
and House intelligence committees, sifting through reform proposals
that had long circulated among intelligence experts in Washington,
suggested one possible way to resolve the conflict: Break up the FBI,
by hiving off a new domestic counter-intelligence agency modeled on
Britain's MI5. The new agency would absorb the FBI's domestic
spook-hunting responsibilities, and would be responsible for nothing
else. That would permit the FBI to do what it does best--law
enforcement--without tearing the fabric of counterintelligence
security. A congressional advisory commission headed by former
Virginia Gov. James Gilmore endorsed the recommendation. The reform
has also been endorsed or entertained by Democratic presidential
candidate John Edwards, Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, and numerous
intelligence professionals from all points of the political spectrum. 
But the Bush administration and the GOP-led Congress eventually
demurred. They created the Homeland Security Department under pressure

>from Democrats, but did little to challenge the bureau's fundamental

structural problems. Even in its embarrassed and demoralized state,
breaking up the bureau would have required immense political capital.
But the year after September 11 was the moment of opportunity for true
reform. And probably no president has ever had so much political
capital on intelligence and national security matters as George W.
Bush did in those crucial months. 
While the issue of breaking up the FBI was fading from the front pages
in the first months of 2003, Katrina Leung continued to exploit the
lack of compartmentation and counter-intelligence procedures at the
FBI (a problem which would have at least been on the way to being
solved by creating a new domestic intelligence agency) to give crucial
American intelligence to the Chinese. 

Free Traitors 
The FBI and its congressional overseers have been given no fewer than
five dramatic indications that the bureau has serious deficiencies as
an intelligence agency: the Ames, Hanssen, and Leung scandals, each of
which stemmed from the same basic problem--poor counterintelligence
measures, particularly lax compartmentation--and the Bromwich Report
and Gilmore Commission, which put elected officials and the public on
no uncertain notice that reform was necessary. But to each of these
five challenges, the FBI and Congress failed to respond--and in each
case, their failure to act enabled further intelligence failures. 
This wasn't simple benign neglect. Some of the nation's most
tightly-held and vital secrets were turned over to adversary states.
That's the kind of failure that usually drives Republicans around the
bend, and for good reason. The mere suggestion that this might have
occurred in the Democratic Chinese fundraising scandal aroused
paroxysms of GOP outrage: from the wildly overheated Cox Commission
Report, to limitless hours of talk radio chatter, to Republican Sen.
Fred Thompson's hearings, all pursuing a line of allegation--that Red
Chinese money had bought favors in the American political system--that
proved unfounded. 
Now we have an actual Chinese spy--charged, though not convicted--who
by all indications was funneling money into U.S. campaigns. Her
treachery is an intelligence failure that comes on the heels of others
tied to similar shortcomings at the FBI, and one in which vital
secrets were given to a power, China, which these same Republicans
were saying two years ago posed the greatest threat to the United
States. And yet we've not had one hearing. Not one commission. There's
been very little coverage in the press, nor is anyone yakking about it
on talk radio. 
The Republicans didn't create the problems at the FBI. But they've sat
on their hands and put politics ahead of the national interest as the
scope of the problem and the cost to national security have become
increasingly apparent. Not only have they ignored the problem, they
have actively sought to shield the FBI from the one reform that almost
everyone agrees would make such breaches of national security secrets
far less likely. That's not just politics as usual. It's not even
garden-variety political hypocrisy. It's a betrayal of the public
trust. 
			
Joshua Micah Marshall is a Washington Monthly contributing writer and
author of Talking Points Memo, www.talkingpointsmemo.com. This article
is a joint project of Understanding Government and The Century
Foundation. 	
_____________
fwd//Starman		

Amazing, isn't it, how silent the Republicans and the so-called
"liberal" mainstream press have been about this latest
counter-terrorism security breach -- possibly the biggest debacle of
the FBI's checkered history. On the heels of the astonishing 911
'failures" (if indeed that's what they were, and not actually and
deliberately compromised from within) and the Bush Whitehouse's
Iraqgate intelligence manipulation in the run-up to war being
fobbed-off as a fumbled CIA information-overview blame-game fiasco,
and in light of the GOP's failed attempt to use the FBI's services to
successfully sting the Clinton Administration, the current dearth of
commentary and public attention to this potential scandal may be
understandable in terms of the media's strong right-wing allegiance
and the GOP's keen self-interest in preserving some control over its
besmirched reputation, but it's a damning and vivid condemnation of to
what extent the GOP places its party's interests above that of
preserving the public trust.

If I wasn't so cynical by now I'd be outraged instead of just mildly &
contemptuously amused. A more-than-passing familiarity with the
widespread systemic flaws and corruptions of the American political
system, along with the many disasterous US foreign policy failures by
way of subversion through the intelligence services and influence if
the military defense-industry has prepared me not to be too surprised
at the occasional revelations of perfidy and malfeasance; That is,
those too significant or of too great political opportunistic
potential to be effectively covered-up or ignored. 

But I must confess, the GOP's success at keeping a firm choke-hold lid
on this major intelligence-security breach is impressive-- as it is
chilling to have such a potent example of the right-wing's controlling
influence on the corporate media so dramatically and tellingly
confirmed.

The selective protective favors granted the GOP by the media in
shielding this story while tossing substantial crumbs to the public
concerning Bush Administration's stumbled Iraqgate intelligence
manipulations is an indication that Bush is being intentionally
distanced as the GOP's primary 2004 presidential candidate, likely
pending whether his handlers can make the current controversy go-away
in the next several months (and prevent further potentially
embarrassing/damaging revelations from emerging).

In any event, I have my well-grounded doubts that the public will have
access to a fair and just election anyway, and that, as usual, when
our opinion is wanted by the powers-that-be we'll be told what they
are.
Jeez, we sure have *so* much to be thankful and grateful for, eh?
(Shiver-and-yawn);
~Starman