Veteran national security
reporter Bill Gertz offers a piece at the freebeacon.com on CIA Director Mike
Pompeo (seen in the above photo) and his reform of CIA counterintelligence.
British spy novelist John le Carre
elegantly called it the oldest question of all: Who can spy on the spies? He
was talking about counterintelligence—the often arcane business of finding
foreign spies who try to penetrate intelligence services.
Counterintelligence at CIA
today is a far cry from its Cold War world of Soviet moles or penetration
agents and neutralizing them or turning them into double agents.
Current CIA Director Mike
Pompeo is working to change all that. Pompeo has elevated the status of CIA's
counterintelligence center, a dedicated unit within the agency's Langley, Va.,
headquarters that is devoted to identifying and countering foreign intelligence
agents and their activities.
CIA counterintelligence
efforts, however, remain limited by a lack of both qualified personnel and
strategic vision needed to deal with a growing spy threat that today includes
both cyber operations and influence activities, in addition to traditional
spying by nations such as China and Russia. The foreign spying threat is
increasing in both scale and sophistication, according to intelligence experts.
As part of the reform, Pompeo
is stepping up internal security at CIA in a bid to better identify
leakers—employees who may be politically motivated to conduct more
non-traditional digital-age crimes—such as exposing secrets in a bid to
undermine American intelligence, or overall U.S. national security.
"The director has made
counterintelligence a priority at CIA because if we don’t achieve perfection in
this realm, all our other efforts at the agency are at risk," said Dean
Boyd, CIA director of public affairs. "The last thing CIA can tolerate is
to have a secret we’ve stolen re-stolen."
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
No comments:
Post a Comment