National Journal Covert Counterattack 09/16/2000

(Part II)

The two agencies work under very different sets of principles. Essentially, the FBI is constrained by constitutional protections and dedicated to gathering evidence and enforcing the law. The CIA specializes in stealing secrets, skirting the law, and not getting caught. If they're going to cooperate more, someone needs to pay very careful attention that those distinctions in how they operate don't get blurred as well."

But architects of the CI-21 initiative are not likely to retreat now. Indeed, the new counterintelligence plan seeks to enlist Pentagon intelligence officials. "The intent behind CI-21 is to bring the defense and national security community into the same kind of theoretical construct that we developed for the FBI and CIA in counterterrorism," McGaffin said. "We wanted to expand that interagency cross-pollination and commonality of purpose into the broader realm of counterintelligence."

A Counterintelligence Czar On a flight back to Washington after a cyberwarfare conference in Texas in 1998, the FBI's Bryant had a lengthy discussion with then-Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre about "Moonlight Maze"- the most pervasive cyberassault ever on the U.S. national computer network. During that electronic invasion-ultimately traced to Moscow-intruders systematically raided hundreds of essential but unclassified computer systems used by the Pentagon, NASA, the Energy Department, and several universities. "It was as if the Russians were coming into the Pentagon every night and measuring the curtains in all the offices, and we did not know why or if anything of importance was taken," said a knowledgeable intelligence source. Largely as a result of the discussions, Bryant and Hamre began organizing twice-monthly meetings of senior officials from the Defense Department, FBI, CIA, and the National Security Council, essentially expanding the "Gang of Eight" to include the leaders of other agencies responsible for U.S. national security. Although the initial meetings focused on the issue of cyberattacks, the participants soon realized that their respective agencies were facing a host of new and unconventional threats for which they were unprepared and poorly organized to counter. Those meetings and the interagency concerns they uncovered launched the Counter-Intelligence 21 initiative.

"Moonlight Maze did help convince me that we needed a new structure that would allow the national security community to coordinate and work together better, because I was confronted by a problem that I lacked the legal authority to fix on my own," said Hamre, now the president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent think tank in Washington. The Defense Department is barred from conducting surveillance or investigations of civilians inside U.S. borders, he said, while the law enforcement community lacks many of the tools to investigate outside the United States. "These borders of responsibility are deeply embedded in American government, yet they are increasingly irrelevant in a more globalized, interconnected world," Hamre said.

"Essentially, Counter- Intelligence 21 is an effort to bridge those internal divides in government in a way that protects Americans from the bad guys while still ensuring their constitutional rights. That's why I made signing off on CI-21 literally my last act as deputy director of Defense."

It's not yet clear whether the CI-21 reforms will work. Unless the new counterintelligence czar has the full backing of the heads of the CIA, FBI, and the Defense Department and real influence on budgetary decisions, he or she may fall short on bureaucratic clout.

Proponents fear the reforms might yet get watered down as Clinton Administration officials prepare to leave office. Nor is it clear whether CI-21 will be considered an adequate answer to congressional concerns, or whether it will conflict with the lawmakers' idea of a domestic counterterrorism czar. "I fully support CI-21, but there are a lot of czars and czarinas running around Washington, and that runs the risk of future fights over bureaucratic fiefdoms," said Smith, a former CIA general counsel. "Over time, I suspect we'll see an emerging pattern of czars or viceroys coordinating their interagency activities whenever these missions intersect."

The new counterintelligence executive will ultimately be judged by his or her ability to anticipate and limit new threats to U.S. national security. A counterintelligence czar might have predicted that China would target the nuclear secrets contained at the national weapons laboratories, if he understood that China had aspirations for a nuclear, blue-water navy, yet was unwilling to risk international isolation by violating the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. Or he might have argued successfully that Russian spy Stanislav Gusev be used to disseminate disinformation or learn the Russians' true intentions, instead of being arrested quickly and expelled. Or a counterintelligence czar, aware that the Middle East peace process was entering a critical stage and that terrorist groups opposed to it might be looking to derail a U.S.-brokered deal, might have anticipated the Y2K operation even earlier.

"The general premise behind CI-21 is to try to determine what are America's true equities, and then to extend this interagency cooperation in a systematic way to try to better protect those assets and deter acts of espionage that target them," said the CIA's Tenet. "We can no longer afford to focus our counterintelligence efforts only after an incident has sparked a full criminal case, because at that point it's too late. The damage has been done."

(End of report)

-- FM (scipublic@aol.com), September 15, 2000