Catching Spies is a Tricky Business
BOOK REVIEW: Spy Fail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence
by James Bamford / Twelve
Reviewed by Cipher Brief Expert Mark Kelton
THE REVIEWER — Mark Kelton retired from CIA as a senior executive with 34 years of experience in intelligence operations including serving as CIA’s Deputy Director for Counterintelligence. He is currently a partner at the FiveEyes Group and is Board Chair of Spookstock, a charity that benefits the CIA Memorial Foundation, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and the Defense Intelligence Memorial Foundation.
REVIEW — In his new book, Spy Fail, James Bamford posits that there has been a “collapse of American Counterintelligence”. The “extensive politicization and incompetence, under both (Presidents) Obama and Trump” of American counterintelligence (CI) has, he asserts, resulted in the country being “flooded with spies and covert operatives”.
The author illuminates this “vast breakdown of America’s counterespionage system” by highlighting what he sees as its inability to obviate the peril posed by what he terms ‘saboteurs’, ‘extortionists’, ‘spies’, ‘smugglers’, ‘moles’, ‘infiltrators’, ‘liquidators’, ‘assassins’ and ‘fear mongers’. Writing in a narrative style, Bamford covers each of those threats in separate ‘books’ within his book, using instances of what he portrays as CI failures to support his cumulative argument of systemic collapse.
For instance, he relates the story of the North Korean hack of SONY as an example of sabotage; the ‘Shadow Brokers’ case to exemplify extortion; and so forth. Some of these books are quite engaging. All speak to purported shortcomings of US CI organizations, particularly the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
One difficulty with such an approach is that a scattershot, anecdotal presentation muddles his argument that there has been a general breakdown of US CI. Taken in the aggregate, what the author seems to be saying is that American CI has failed to mount an effective defense against cyber compromises; influence operations and old-fashioned human spying.
A look at the headlines on any given day attests that the US CI community certainly faces formidable challenges. However, perhaps swayed by his own skirmishes with the CI and security elements of US agencies over the years, the author overstates his case. He also has an apparently incomplete understanding of the institutional, legal and ethical boundaries within which American CI professionals work.
Although the FBI has legal charge of the investigation of cases covered by the Espionage Act, responsibility for the implementation of CI functions, rests with individual agencies in accord with their missions and mandates. This is not the most efficient structure. But the establishment of anything resembling a surveillance state sufficiently robust to obviate all the threats the author cites being anathema to our values, we have rightly opted to prioritize respect for individual rights over efficiency in the way we deal with actual and potential CI threats.
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During the Cold War, the greatest achievement an operations officer could register was the recruitment of an agent with access to sensitive files in a target installation. Such successes were as celebrated as they were rare. But the damage such an agent could inflict pales in comparison with the havoc that can be wrought by those with privileged access to today’s massive data holdings. Now, as Rebecca West prophesized, “the small fry also have the power of betrayal…(making)… the problem of security more difficult to solve.”. Looking at CI in the cyber arena, the author rightly focusses on the menace of nefarious insider and external actors. He does so by taking the reader through a succession of cases he says exemplify CI incompetence.
The author begins with the North Korean hack of SONY; moves on to the pilfering of massive amounts of information from the National Security Agency (NSA) by Harold Martin; and continues with the auction by Shadow Brokers of NSA cyber tools; before concluding with the purported use by Pyongyang of stolen NSA tools released by Shadow Brokers to initiate a worldwide wave of cyber mayhem. It is a sensational tale. And it may be factual. I don’t know. But experience tells me it is at least incomplete in the telling and that things we don’t know about these incidents might mitigate against the firm linkages and conclusions the author draws from them.
For instance, it is certainly true that the Martin case — as with any malicious insider operating undetected within a secret organization — was demonstrative of gaps in NSA’s insider threat program. And the theft of cyber tools by Shadow Brokers could not have occurred had NSA sufficiently protected them.
At the same time, the author’s judgement that NSA is “to blame” for the North Korean exploitation and deployment of one of those tools is overly harsh. If the author’s presentation is correct, NSA is responsible for not preventing that theft and for not drawing the appropriate lessons from that experience.
Nevertheless, it is the person or persons who took those tools who are ‘to blame’ for giving the North Koreans the wherewithal to do what they did. More generally, the author appears incapable of the unbiased and dispassionate critique necessary to the success of any endeavor as uncertain as CI.
For instance, one wonders whether the pointed criticism he levels at a named FBI agent working on the Martin case would have been included in this book, if that agent had not earlier been involved in the investigation of accused NSA leaker Thomas Drake.
The author’s consideration of foreign influence operations focuses on what he depicts as an extensive, ongoing Israeli intelligence campaign aimed at influencing our government to adopt policies favorable to Tel Aviv, to sway public opinion in favor of — and to discredit opposition to — the Jewish state. The author goes on at length to lay out the involvement of several named Americans in that effort. He makes a solid case that Israel has mounted intelligence operations on US soil and involved US persons that were injurious to US interests, to include operations in support of its nuclear weapons program. Yet, I found this concentration on Israeli activities curious. This is not to say American CI should not work to detect and thwart any Israeli intelligence operations directed against the US or carried out on US soil. One need only think back to the damage to US national security done by Jonathan Pollard — a case the author cites — to see that American CI needs to continue to work to uncover any such operations.
At the same time, however, we should understand that, as CIA CI Chief James Angleton (or, more likely, one of his deputies citing his boss) said, “there are no friendly intelligence services. There are only the intelligence services of friendly nations”. All intelligence services are in business to collect privileged information and influence events to the benefit of the countries they serve. History is replete with examples of this involving even our closest allies.
One need only think back to the British role in promulgating the Zimmermann Telegram and the campaign mounted by British intelligence to influence the US to enter the Second World War on Britain’s side to see evidence of this.
All intelligence activities are not equally dangerous to US national security. American CI entities must, accordingly, distinguish between the threats posed by the intelligence services of friendly countries and those emanating from adversaries seeking to undermine our democratic system and degrade our national power, prioritizing their operational focus and resources accordingly.
It must also be said that the author’s clear anti-Israeli biases — views abundantly evident in the book — detract from his argument. For instance, he claims that Israel ethnically cleansed Palestinians from their land; draws uncritical parallels between Israel and apartheid era South Africa and asserts that claims that “phony charges of anti-Semitism” charges levelled against supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are “the tired, go-to weapon used to instantly silence the press and critics of Israel”. Given the histories of the high-profile critics of Israel cited by the author, he might do well to consider the possibility that when people make anti-Semitic remarks, they might actually be anti-Semites.
Given my knowledge of, or involvement with several of the human espionage cases cited by the author, I won’t address the veracity or lack thereof of his recounting of them. Of course, we would not know about the spies he cites unless there had been some modicum of CI success in uncovering them. I was chagrined to see unnamed intelligence officers cited as sources in the book. Fortuitously, many within the secret world who think they know what occurred in any operation are, by design, often not fully cognizant of what really took place. “It is”, as Churchill famously joked, “wonderful how well men can keep secrets they have not been told.”
More broadly, in making the case that the failure to detect the hostile intelligence activities he cites before considerable damage was inflicted, is indicative of a ‘collapse’ of American CI, the author seems to postulate that there is an objective historical standard against which we can juxtapose today’s CI performance to determine that such a collapse has occurred. But has there ever been a time in our history when American CI was able obviate the threat spies and leakers posed to the Republic? In fact, there has never been a period of our history when we have not been beset by them.
Benjamin Church, Edward Bancroft and — most infamously — Benedict Arnold damaged the patriot cause during the Revolution. Of the three, only Arnold’s treason was revealed before he could operate for a significant period as a spy — and then only by happenstance, rather than due to any concerted counterintelligence effort. George Washington lamented the leaking of his military plans in the press of the day, saying that he “wished that our printers were more discreet”. And Abraham Lincoln famously quipped, “It’s not me that cannot keep a secret, it’s the people I tell that can’t.”
Even if one looks at the period following the empowerment of the FBI as the first real American CI service in the run-up to and throughout, the Second World War, there were numerous spy cases that did significant damage to US national security before being detected. These included not only spies working on behalf of the Axis powers, but also literally hundreds of Americans who worked secretly for the Soviet Union as revealed by the VENONA project, probably the greatest CI success the US has ever achieved.
The Cold War began with espionage cases derived from VENONA that included Americans who passed information on the atomic bomb to Moscow as part of Soviet intelligence’s ENORMOZ operation. Spies were routinely detected and arrested over the decades thereafter, through the so-called year of the spy, 1985; to the Cold war’s denouement with the 1993 arrest or CIA officer Aldrich Ames and the 2001 uncovering of FBI officer Robert Hanssen as Russian spies.
In the post-Cold War era, we have seen — and continue to see — arrests of American citizens charged with spying against both national security agencies and US industry on behalf of foreign powers. Former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) CI Chief Paul Redmond’s comment that “there is an actuarial certainty that there are other spies in U.S. national security agencies and there always will be” is surely as accurate today as when he made it following Hanssen arrest (with the proviso that we might add spies — particularly those working for China).
We certainly face major CI challenges today. CI is a tough, imperfect business and our adversaries will have successes in the future. But history would indicate that taking every hostile spy or operation revealed as indicative of a CI collapse, is folly.
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If there has been a ‘collapse’ in the US national security arena, it has been in the professional discipline of an alarming number of those charged with safeguarding this nation’s secrets as evidenced by the tsunami of leaks we have seen dating at least back to Snowden’s treachery.
Barry Goldwater’s quip in the 1960’s that “there are more leaks here than in the men’s room at Anheuser -Busch”, reminds us that leaks are not new to Washington. What has changed, is the injection of partisan politics into what should be the apolitical realm of national security that has fueled those leaks.
The catastrophic handling of the ‘Russiagate’ debacle — to include the credulity with which the FBI investigators approached the Steele Dossier and the credence those who publicly propagated it lent to what the author rightly calls a “deliberately leaked, largely phony but sensational” document — is well covered in the book.
The author’s characterization of Maria Butina as the “scapegoat” for a flawed investigation rather than as a suspected Russian agent against which a persuasive case could not be made is, likewise, problematic. The author is, as he convincingly argues, surely right in expressing concern about the role politicization played in the ‘Russiagate’ affair. The fact that large numbers of Americans are consequently concerned about unequal application of the law and misuse of authority, thereby undermining their trust in — and hence the mission-effectiveness of — organizations charged with protecting our country from real CI threats should concern us all.
The author denounces as “dangerous” leaks such as that he says occurred at “the highest levels of the CIA”, an action he contends resulted in the loss of the Agency’s most valuable spy in Russia”. I have no idea whether this allegation is true. If it is, I join the author by condemning such unauthorized disclosures in the harshest terms.
The author’s use of leaked material to try to show the ineffectiveness of American CI in preventing leaks is oddly effective. But there is much irony — and not a little hypocrisy — inherent in an author whose career rests so heavily upon leaking, damning a practice so injurious to American CI that he has done so much to encourage. As with his earlier books on the NSA, the author relies heavily upon leakers for the material that is contained in his book.
As if to justify this, the author rationalizes the actions of some of the most notorious recent leakers by conflating their breaking of sworn oaths to protect the sensitive information entrusted to them with whistleblowing in that those he names — to include Manning, Kiriakou, Winner, etc. — took no actions to exercise lawful avenues available to legitimate whistleblowers to voice their concerns, this argument is spurious. They violated their oaths, not as martyrs in great causes but out of egotism, grievance, or some other equally banal motivation. The only difference between the leaker and the spy is that the latter is in league with a foreign power. Either can do grave damage to our national security.
Finally, the validity of the author’s assertion that there has been a collapse in American CI is undermined by the uncertain, unending and unforgivingly subjective nature of a craft which, as the later Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said, “is not a game for the soft-hearted”. CI practitioners are invariably open to criticism even when an objective success such as the discovery of a foreign spy is achieved. That harsh reality has been known to frustrate even the most senior intelligence professionals, a dichotomy best represented by former Director of the CIA and the FBI William Webster, when he lamented that “when you are not catching spies you are accused of having bad counterintelligence and when you are catching spies you are accused of having bad counterintelligence. You cannot have it both ways!” Alas, as the author repeatedly demonstrates in this book, you can.
Spy Fail earns a mild two out of four trench coats.
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