Counterintelligence Quotes

Every Librarian is a highly trained agent. An expert in intelligence, counterintelligence, Boolean searching, and hand-to-hand combat.

Do not forget that a traitor within our ranks, known to us, can do more harm to the enemy than a loyal man can do good to us.

Anyone can deceive us .... for a time. [KGB]

Fascist governments do not permit revolutionary or progressive operation groups to exist, no matter how peaceful or nonviolent they are. It doesn't matter whether the fascist government simply outlawed the groups like in Nazi Germany or mounts a counterintelligence campaign to destroy opposition groups like in the U.S.

The same year as the Perón visit, American counterintelligence concluded that the Vatican as an institution—not merely as a group of scattered, rogue clerics—was helping high-ranking Nazis escape justice.94

Small changes among the masses, can have a massive impact across the world.

Stephen had been put to sleep in his usual room, far from children and noise, away in that corner of the house which looked down to the orchard and the bowling-green, and in spite of his long absence it was so familiar to him that when he woke at about three he made his way to the window almost as quickly as if dawn had already broken, opened it and walked out onto the balcony. The moon had set: there was barely a star to be seen. The still air was delightfully fresh with falling dew, and a late nightingale, in an indifferent voice, was uttering a routine jug-jug far down in Jack's plantations; closer at hand and more agreeable by far, nightjars churred in the orchard, two of them, or perhaps three, the sound rising and falling, intertwining so that the source could not be made out for sure. There were few birds that he preferred to nightjars, but it was not they that had brought him out of bed: he stood leaning on the balcony rail and presently Jack Aubrey, in a summer-house by the bowling-green, began again, playing very gently in the darkness, improvising wholly for himself, dreaming away on his violin with a mastery that Stephen had never heard equalled, though they had played together for years and years. Like many other sailors Jack Aubrey had long dreamed of lying in his warm bed all night long; yet although he could now do so with a clear conscience he often rose at unChristian hours, particularly if he were moved by strong emotion, and crept from his bedroom in a watch-coat, to walk about the house or into the stables or to pace the bowling-green. Sometimes he took his fiddle with him. He was in fact a better player than Stephen, and now that he was using his precious Guarnieri rather than a robust sea-going fiddle the difference was still more evident: but the Guarnieri did not account for the whole of it, nor anything like. Jack certainly concealed his excellence when they were playing together, keeping to Stephen's mediocre level: this had become perfectly clear when Stephen's hands were at last recovered from the thumb-screws and other implements applied by French counter-intelligence officers in Minorca; but on reflexion Stephen thought it had been the case much earlier, since quite apart from his delicacy at that period, Jack hated showing away. Now, in the warm night, there was no one to be comforted, kept in countenance, no one could scorn him for virtuosity, and he could let himself go entirely; and as the grave and subtle music wound on and on, Stephen once more contemplated on the apparent contradiction between the big, cheerful, florid sea-officer whom most people liked on sight but who would have never been described as subtle or capable of subtlety by any one of them (except perhaps his surviving opponents in battle) and the intricate, reflective music he was now creating. So utterly unlike his limited vocabulary in words, at times verging upon the inarticulate. 'My hands have now regained the moderate ability they possessed before I was captured,' observed Maturin, 'but his have gone on to a point I never thought he could reach: his hands and his mind. I am amazed. In his own way he is the secret man of the world.

SPECTRE – The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion.

Before his inauguration, President-elect Trump did not know that the FBI was secretly conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Michael Flynn, but once he did, it would plant seeds of paranoia that would germinate and take root during his presidency.

Nobody back then had ever heard of the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) set up by the FBI. Nobody could possibly have known that the FBI had sent a phony letter to Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers, “signed” by the Panther 21, criticizing Huey Newton’s leadership. No one could have known that the FBI had sent a letter to Huey’s brother saying the New York Panthers were plotting to kill him. No one could have known that the FBI’s COINTELPRO was attempting to destroy the Black Panther Party in particular and the Black Liberation Movement in general, using divide-and-conquer tactics.

federal government is the third largest user of the polygraph test to detect lying. In 1982 22,597 tests were reported by various federal agencies.* Most were given to investigate a crime, except for the polygraph tests given by the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These agencies use the polygraph for intelligence and counterintelligence investigations.

Why solicit more assaults from critics, many in the highest parts of our government, who have deliberately attempted to distract attention from the real issue of a compromised president’s corrupt complicity in Russian interference? Especially when, aside from required testimony, I have stayed silent for years. First out of duty to the FBI’s rules and then to protect and respect an ongoing investigation. Because the Russians haven’t gone away.

IN THE AUTUMN of 1944, the Soviets received the first of many intelligence reports directly from Los Alamos. The spies overlooked by Army counterintelligence included Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist with British citizenship, and Ted Hall, a precociously brilliant nineteen-year-old with a Harvard B.S. in physics. Hall arrived in Los Alamos in late January 1944, while Fuchs came in August as part of the British team led by Rudolf Peierls. Fuchs,

These were lessons that I would learn again and again in the years to come, but always in distant lands, always in places that lacked the robust democratic institutions of the United States and the legal scaffolding that supports it, the Constitution. I never thought I’d have occasion to revisit these lessons at home in the United States, and I never expected to see the grotesque traits of dictators in Haiti or Iran reflected in my own Commander-in-Chief.

I had lived through four revolutions on three continents. Whether in Iran, West Africa, or Haiti, all shared common characteristics, and all taught me lessons about dictators and authoritarians and their hunger to consolidate power and obtain, or at least convey legitimacy. That quest for legitimacy played out in a host of ways. One was the desire to manipulate, control, or discredit media. A relentless distortion of reality numbs a country’s populace to outrage and weakens its ability to discern truth from fiction. Another way dictators sought to secure power and legitimacy was by co-opting the power of the state, its military, law enforcement, and judicial systems, to carry out personal goals and vendettas rather than the nation’s needs. Still, another was by undermining dissent, questioning the validity of opposition, and refusing to honor public will, up to and including threatening or preventing the peaceful transfer of power.

Mine was, probably, the easiest imaginable kind of arrest. It did not tear me from the embrace of kith and kin, nor wrench me from a deeply cherished home life. One pallid European February it took me from our narrow salient on the Baltic Sea, where, depending on one's point of view, either we had surrounded the Germans or they had surrounded us, and it deprived me only of my familiar artillery battery and the scenes of the last three months of war. The brigade commander called me to his headquarters and asked me for my pistol; I turned it over without suspecting any evil intent, when suddenly, from a tense, immobile suite of staff officers in the corner, two counterintelligence officers stepped forward hurriedly, crossed the room in a few quick bounds, their four hands grabbed simultaneously at the star on my cap, my shoulder boards, my officer's belt, my map case, and they shouted theatrically: "You are under arrest!" Burning and prickling from head to toe, all I could explain was, "Me? What for?" Across the sheer gap separating me from those left behind, across that quarantine line not event a sound dared penetrate, came the unthinkable magic words of the brigade commander: "Sholzhenitsyn. Come back here." "You have ..." he asked weightily, "a friend on the First Ukrainian Front?" I knew instantly I had been arrested because of my correspondence with a school friend and understood what direction to expect danger.

My entrance into the courtyard caused a small stir among the lookouts. I could tell because in the middle of February, in the dark of night, Baxter Terrace suddenly sounded like an Audubon Society refuge - birdcalls being the latest in urban drug - selling counterintelligence... Birdcalls allowed much more information to be imparted to other members of the operation, without the visitor being aware of what was being communicated. So while a crow's harsh cry could harken the arrival of a member of the city narcotics unit - a significant threat - the sweet song of a chickadee might signal an officer who was merely escorting a social worker to an appointment allowing business to continue in guarded fashion. Someone like me, a stranger on unknown business, might warrant a whipporwill's call. Where exactly a city kid learned what a whipporwill sounded like, I have no idea. But these kids were nothing if not resourceful. It makes you wonder what they could have accomplished under different circumstances.

[The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries.

Rationality is the brick and mortar that creates a firm foundation of trust. It keeps things real, reflects only honesty, and helps you determine who people actually are, and what they really want. Emotion builds a foundation of sand, ever-shifting as moods change, creating sinkholes of confusion, doubt, and dishonesty.

heroin pipeline whose outlet is Beirut. These eighteen men, all experts in conspiracy, in the highest ranges of secret communication and action and, above all, of silence, also shared one supreme virtue – every man had a solid cover. Every man possessed a valid passport with up-to-date visas for the principal countries in the world, and an entirely clean sheet with Interpol and with their respective national police forces. That factor alone, the factor of each man’s cleanliness after a lifetime in big crime, was his highest qualification for membership of SPECTRE – The Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. The founder and chairman of this private enterprise for private profit was Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

Here is your modern American solution. And most people think it worked perfectly. We won the Cold War by living high off the hog. Isn’t that the real story here? We beat the Russians by talk and retreat, by growing softer and softer under a shopping ethic. We let our kids smoke pot, our schools descend into political correctness, while counter-intelligence collapsed — if it was ever there at all. But then, we didn’t really win the Cold War.

The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep-rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counter-intelligence – a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honour interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks.

Is this a coordinated conspiracy? The uncomfortable truth was that I didn’t know. Despite everything that had occurred, we still didn’t know what Trump knew, and the answer would likely come only from him or his inner circle. I was skeptical that all the different threads amounted to anything more than bumbling incompetence, a confederacy of dunces who were too dumb to collude as someone joked. In my view, they were most likely a collection of grifters pursuing individual personal interests, their own money, and power-driven agendas.

Those prisoners who were eventually liberated and returned to the Soviet Union - well over one and a half million - had to face extensive discrimination following an order issued by Stalin in August 1941 equating surrender with treason. Many of them were despatched to the labour camps of the Gulag after being screened by Soviet military counter-intelligence. Despite attempts after Stalin’s death by top military leader Marshal Georgi Zhukov to end discrimination against former prisoners of war, they were not formally rehabilitated until 1994.217

But states have difficulty evaluating cybersecurity threats. If a state does detect an intrusion in one of its vital networks and if that intrusion looks to be from another state, what should the state suffering the intrusion conclude? On the one hand, it might be a defensive-minded intrusion, only checking out the intruded-upon state’s capabilities and providing reassuring intelligence to the intruding state. This might seem unsettling but not necessarily threatening, presuming the state suffering the intrusion was not developing capabilities for attack or seeking conflict. On the other hand, the intrusion might be more nefarious. It could be a sign of some coming harm, such as a cyber attack or an expanding espionage operation. The state suffering the intrusion will have to decide which of these two possibilities is correct, interpreting limited and almost certainly insufficient amounts of data to divine the intentions of another state. Thus Chapter Four’s argument is vitally important: intrusions into a state’s strategically important networks pose serious risks and are therefore inherently threatening. Intrusions launched by one state into the networks of another can cause a great deal of harm at inopportune times, even if the intrusion at the moment of discovery appears to be reasonably benign. The intrusion can also perform reconnaissance that enables a powerful and well-targeted cyber attack. Even operations launched with fully defensive intent can serve as beachheads for future attack operations, so long as a command and control mechanism is set up. Depending on its target, the intrusion can collect information that provides great insight into the communications and strategies of policy-makers. Network intrusions can also pose serious counterintelligence risks, revealing what secrets a state has learned about other states and provoking a damaging sense of paranoia. Given these very real threats, states are likely to view any serious intrusion with some degree of fear. They therefore have significant incentive to respond strongly, further animating the cybersecurity dilemma.

Tim Tigner began his career in Soviet Counterintelligence with the US Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. That was back in the Cold War days when, “We learned Russian so you didn't have to,” something he did at the Presidio of Monterey alongside Recon Marines and Navy SEALs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tim switched from espionage to arbitrage. Armed with a Wharton MBA rather than a Colt M16, he moved to Moscow in the midst of Perestroika. There, he led prominent multinational medical companies, worked with cosmonauts on the MIR Space Station (from Earth, alas), chaired the Association of International Pharmaceutical Manufacturers, and helped write Russia’s first law on healthcare. Moving to Brussels during the formation of the EU, Tim ran Europe, Middle East, and Africa for a Johnson & Johnson company and traveled like a character in a Robert Ludlum novel. He eventually landed in Silicon Valley, where he launched new medical technologies as a startup CEO. In his free time, Tim has climbed the peaks of Mount Olympus, hang glided from the cliffs of Rio de Janeiro, and ballooned over Belgium. He earned scuba certification in Turkey, learned to ski in Slovenia, and ran the Serengeti with a Maasai warrior. He acted on stage in Portugal, taught negotiations in Germany, and chaired a healthcare conference in Holland. Tim studied psychology in France, radiology in England, and philosophy in Greece. He has enjoyed ballet at the Bolshoi, the opera on Lake Como, and the symphony in Vienna. He’s been a marathoner, paratrooper, triathlete, and yogi.  Intent on combining his creativity with his experience, Tim began writing thrillers in 1996 from an apartment overlooking Moscow’s Gorky Park. Decades later, his passion for creative writing continues to grow every day. His home office now overlooks a vineyard in Northern California, where he lives with his wife Elena and their two daughters. Tim grew up in the Midwest, and graduated from Hanover College with a BA in Philosophy and Mathematics. After military service and work as a financial analyst and foreign-exchange trader, he earned an MBA in Finance and an MA in International Studies from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton and Lauder Schools.  Thank you for taking the time to read about the author. Tim is most grateful for his loyal fans, and loves to correspond with readers like you. You are welcome to reach him directly at tim@timtigner.com.

During the Second World War there was an interrogator for Army Counter-Intelligence by the name of Lieutenant Colonel Oreste Pinto. It was his task to break the cover of enemy spies, and he’s one of my weirder heroes. In 1942 Pinto had a man at the other side of his desk who instinct told him had to be an enemy agent. Before arriving at the Colonel’s office (just off The Strand in central London), this suspect had been through many searing investigations and survived them all. Notwithstanding that, the authorities continued to harbour suspicions; but nobody could break him. So what did Pinto think? Pinto interrogated his man over a period of days. The suspect had an impeccable Oxford accent, excellent socio-geographic knowledge, backed up by documentation that was as good as it gets. Down to the last little parochial nuance, he had an answer for everything, and seemed totally and utterly kosher. Even so, Pinto was convinced he was dealing with an exceptionally talented spy whose true provenance was Berlin. But he couldn’t crack him, so he invited him out to lunch. Ten minutes later they were walking up The Strand, about to cross it to go to the chosen restaurant when, as they stepped off the kerb, Pinto screamed, ‘Look out!’ – and he got his German because the bastard looked the wrong way. ‘We drive on the left in England, old boy.

One of our primary aims in counterintelligence as it concerns the [Black Panther Party] is to keep this group isolated from the moderate black and white community which may support it. This is most emphatically pointed out in their Breakfast for Children Program, where they are actively soliciting and receiving support from uninformed whites and moderate blacks. . . . You state that the Bureau under the [Counterintelligence Program] should not attack programs of community interest such as the [Black Panther Party] “Breakfast for Children.” You state that this is because many prominent “humanitarians,” both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You have obviously missed the point. —J. Edgar Hoover to FBI Special Agent in Charge, San Francisco, May 27, 1969

That summer, Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pro-Castro literature stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a commercial building. This was a blunder because Oswald actually was under the control of an anti-Castro operation headquartered there. W. Guy Banister, his controller, had connections in military intelligence, the CIA and a section of the World Anti-Communist League set up by Willoughby and his Far Pacific intelligence unit in Taiwan. In The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Krüger disclosed that the International Fascista was “not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s grey eminence, and prince Justo Valerio Borghesé, the Italian fascist money man rescued from justice at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton.

The goal was a U.S. Gestapo. Senator Ervin described the espionage squad inside the White House as a “gestapo mentality.” J. Edgar Hoover refused any part of the gestapo, saying the secret Domestic Intelligence operations “denied our civil liberties.” The Inter-Agency Group (IAG) on Domestic Intelligence and Internal Security includes members from the FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, Counter-Intelligence agencies of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Police Departments.

Provisions for martial law and the institutions to implement a military dictatorship inside the U.S. affect all facets of our society. No persons suffer more than political prisoners, victims of the police state. The prison system reflects the quality and justice of the surrounding society. Tiger cages in Vietnam, islands of torture in Greece, assassination police squads and torture in Brazil, extermination camps in Germany have been powerful and necessary methods of silencing political opponents. Knowing such prisons exist keeps the moderate and frightened from voicing objections to oppression. The same Justice Dept., FBI, counter-intelligence agencies working inside the White House that condoned election sabotage and the “horror stories” come down upon radicals inside the prisons as well as on the streets.

In the post-Soviet era, the KGB was disbanded, renamed, reorganized, and renamed again. Eventually, the basic elements of the old organization were split into two new services: the FSB and the SVR. The FSB handled domestic security and counterintelligence, and took over the KGB’s old central headquarters in Lubyanka Square. The SVR became Russia’s new foreign intelligence service. Headquartered in Yasenevo, it was essentially the old First Chief Directorate of the KGB with a new name.

intrusion: someone had accessed and exfiltrated 19.7 million security clearance applications. Not only was the applicant information stolen, but the applications themselves revealed information about 1.8 million nonapplicants referenced in the applications, mostly family members. Even worse, they got transcripts of interviews conducted by background investigators, along with the usernames and passwords that applicants had used to fill out forms online, and 5.6 million fingerprint files. We all but knew from the start that Chinese intelligence was responsible for the theft, and the counterintelligence implications were staggering, not just from what they had, but from what they didn’t have. OPM didn’t conduct security clearance investigations for all of the IC elements, and whoever had the wherewithal to penetrate its systems would certainly know which agencies and departments OPM conducted investigations for and which they didn’t. They could therefore also start making assumptions about cover for cleared people whose files they didn’t have.

The relationship between cricket (that most English of sports) and spying (at which the British have always excelled) is deep rooted and unique. Something about the game attracts the sort of mind also drawn to the secret worlds of intelligence and counterintelligence—a complex test of brain and brawn, a game of honor interwoven with trickery, played with ruthless good manners and dependent on minute gradations of physics and psychology, with tea breaks. Some of the most notable British spies have been cricketers or cricket enthusiasts. Hitler played cricket, but only once. In 1930 it was claimed that, having seen British POWs playing in southern Germany during the First World War, the Nazi party leader asked to be “initiated into the mysteries of our national game.” A match was played against Hitler’s team, after which he declared that the rules should be altered by the “withdrawal of the use of pads” and using a “bigger and harder ball.” Hitler could not understand the subtlety of a game like cricket; he thought only in terms of speed, spectacle, violence. Cricket was the ideal sport on which to model an organization bent on stumping the Führer.

suggested to the entire workforce that they read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important things I ever read. Inspired in part by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, King’s letter is about seeking justice in a deeply flawed world. I have reread it several times since first encountering it in college. Because I knew that the FBI’s interaction with the civil rights movement, and Dr. King in particular, was a dark chapter in the Bureau’s history, I wanted to do something more. I ordered the creation of a curriculum at the FBI’s Quantico training academy. I wanted all agent and analyst trainees to learn the history of the FBI’s interaction with King, how the legitimate counterintelligence mission against Communist infiltration of our government had morphed into an unchecked, vicious campaign of harassment and extralegal attack on the civil rights leader and others. I wanted them to remember that well-meaning people lost their way. I wanted them to know that the FBI sent King a letter blackmailing him and suggesting he commit suicide. I wanted them to stare at that history, visit the inspiring King Memorial in Washington, D.C., with its long arcs of stone bearing King’s words, and reflect on the FBI’s values and our responsibility to always do better. The FBI Training Division created a curriculum that does just that. All FBI trainees study that painful history and complete the course by visiting the memorial. There, they choose one of Dr. King’s quotations from the wall—maybe “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” or “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy”—and then write an essay about the intersection of that quotation and the FBI’s values. The course doesn’t tell the trainees what to think. It only tells them they must think, about history and institutional values. Last I checked, the course remains one of the highest-rated portions of their many weeks at Quantico.

George Piro, had gathered evidence that al-Qaeda had a network of adherents at American flight schools. Williams urged a nationwide investigation. He was unsurprised when headquarters took no action; thirteen years of experience had taught him that counterintelligence and counterterrorism were “bastard stepchildren” at the FBI.

Tokhtakhounov was indicted and arrested by Italian police on charges of conspiracy to rig the competition. For months the FBI worked with the Italians and with Interpol to get him extradited. Before long, word came to the squad that a Russian oligarch had pledged two hundred million dollars to get Tokhtakhounov out of jail. Next thing we knew, his release was ordered by the Italian Supreme Court. He was gone, in the wind, back to Russia, where he has been living openly. (And from there, he allegedly continued to run criminal enterprises in the United States. In 2013, Tokhtakhounov was indicted for money laundering in connection with an illegal gambling ring that operated out of Trump Tower. Several months after this indictment, Tokhtakhounov was a VIP guest at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow.) We’ve never had a chance to get him again. In the scheme of things, the evident corruption behind a figure-skating medal may seem trivial. But for me and for a lot of guys on our squad, this was a critical turn of events. One of our worst fears was that the top tier of the vory v zakone would use money to undermine Western institutions in which many millions of Americans have reflexive faith. That fear had now been realized, and we asked ourselves what institutions might be next, and we asked whether any American public official might be susceptible to a two-hundred-million-dollar bribe, and we asked whether democracy itself might become a target. HOW WE WORK Enterprise Theory Muddy Wingtips Most FBI investigations are conducted by the Bureau’s criminal, counterterrorism, or counterintelligence divisions.

direction, and you really know how to get things done. The American people are fortunate that you’ve chosen to serve us in your current capacity. Gator speaks incessantly about seeking employment elsewhere, but I think it’s just talk. He loves this line of work, and we have a lot of fun together at DIA. We share a common view of our world. But remember, Gator: You can’t expect to find a spy under every rock or behind every tree. You simply have to believe that a spy is there, somewhere, and that if you look under every rock and behind every tree, you will eventually find him. I expect Gator to remain welded to my hip for another decade or so. Ana Montes will serve her time productively, I am sure. Knowing Ana, she’ll be running the place before too long. I understand that she remains unrepentant about providing information to the Cubans. She still believes that she did the right, just, and moral thing in supporting them, and I suspect that she will hold that view for the rest of her life. That’s fine. At least she’s no longer in a position to cause the rest of us any harm. Ana Montes is now incarcerated near Fort Worth, Texas. Ana’s boyfriend, Bill, has had a rough time of it. He requested and received permission to remain in contact with Ana after her arrest, up until she was convicted. He sensed, understandably, that she needed his support during an emotional time in her life. But he made clear to me, during one of several meetings on the subject, that his support for Ana would end if and when she was convicted of the crime. Bill was as good as his word. Part of him feels sorry for Ana, but he can never understand or condone what she did. He is torn, but Bill is moving forward with his life without her. As for me, I continue to march. There are some among my peers in this business who take exception to my having published a book about my experience on the job. It goes against their grain. Some may even avoid working with me in the future, for fear that their actions and words will end up in a book somewhere or because they feel that I’ve crossed an ethical line by publishing this story. I understand. So be it. I remain firmly focused on my mission. I am not a writer. I am a counterintelligence investigator. And my job is to detect and investigate espionage and suspected espionage within the Defense Intelligence Agency. I’ve performed that job for almost two decades now, and I expect to continue

At the end of the interrogation, Moustakas said, Kelley was escorted out of CIA headquarters by a senior counterintelligence officer, who also took his badge. He was placed on administrative leave that was to last twenty-one months. In limbo, falsely accused as a spy and facing a possible death penalty, Kelley, having served his country for thirty-seven years, had nowhere to turn. He could only wait, and hope that he would eventually be cleared of the crime he knew he had not committed.

The bureau set its sights high; it did not hesitate to go after even the celebrated Viktor Cherkashin, the canny KGB chief of counterintelligence in the Washington residency, who, as the CIA and the bureau later learned to their sorrow, was the key player in the handling of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. The attempt to recruit Cherkashin was made by Ray Mislock, then the special agent in charge of counterintelligence for the FBI’s Washington field office. Cherkashin had returned to Washington around 1997 to attend a conference. It was long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and by this time senior KGB officers often fraternized with American intelligence officials, their former foes, at various international meetings.

In July, Trump operative George Papadopoulos told an Australian official that the Russians were giving the campaign dirt on Clinton, and the Australian government shared the information with the U.S. By the end of July, FBI director James Comey opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

But Freeh’s FBI managed to bury the fact that its most highly valued source on Chinese espionage in the United States, a politically wired California woman named Katrina Leung, had been spying for China throughout the 1980s and 1990s. All the while, she was having sex with the special agent in charge of her case, a top supervisor of the FBI’s China Squad, James J. Smith—and occasionally with a leading FBI counterintelligence expert on China, William Cleveland.

The number of interrogators who have been bamboozled since the dawn of history by the body language and appealing manner of pretty prisoners is, to be precise, 43,123,465; in the time it has taken to write this sentence, that number has increased by 314.

For the FBI, the [successful] search for an illegal [was]… the ultimate goal in counter-intelligence.” William Sullivan and Sam Papich were the widely accepted false identity experts for the Bureau, working closely with CIA counterpart James Angleton, but occasionally a commentator with inside knowledge names a lesser-known FBI expert in false identity.

three hundred CIA officers—from first-tour spies to chiefs of station—had failed agency polygraph tests designed, in part, to unmask moles. Results of the tests were supposed to guide counterintelligence. But in the CIA’s culture, Curran explained, you could fail

Believe it or not, Mal, this is a good friend of mine, Alex Parker. I asked him to attend a Counterintelligence Awareness Group briefing I organized so he could tell us about some of the latest internet security measures being developed in the private sector. He runs his own company in DC. Does a lot of government contracts. We served together in Afghanistan.

Albright hadn't called him back yet, which pissed him off, but in the brief and fleeting moment when he put himself in Albright's shoes he recognized the supervisory special agent in the Counterintelligence Division was probably busier than a onearmed fan dancer at the moment with the leak investigation at the NSC.

numbers of these operations that enable a portion of them to succeed. The number of clandestine intelligence operations conducted by the PRC overwhelms Western counterintelligence and law enforcement agencies. In addition, the PRC’s limited information objectives, focused on midlevel technology, puts much of its intelligence activity below Western governments’ threshold of concern.

Coffee he drinks—nothing else—just coffee all the time. He says Germans are too introspective to make good agents, and it all comes out in counterintelligence. He says counterintelligence people are like wolves chewing dry bones—you have to take away the bones and make them find new quarry—I see all that, I know what he means. But he’s gone too far.

The American embassy in Moscow is situated at No. 8 Bolshoy Deviatinsky Pereulok in a towering glass and stone edifice that took some twenty-seven tortured years to complete. In 1985, during the final act of the Cold War, counterintelligence uncovered that the KGB had honeycombed the chancery building’s steel skeleton with listening devices to such a degree that it essentially rendered the half-built embassy unusable. A quarter-century of head-scratching and diplomatic gridlock later, the top two floors of the embassy were dissembled brick-by-brick and replaced with four new floors, constructed to the most stringent security standards. Although their present adversaries now operated under a different alphabet soup of three-letter acronyms, the elements of the US intelligence community in Moscow had considerably turned the tables on their host

counter-intelligence work. It was all shirt and no pants.

The FBI nicknamed the program COINTELPRO, as a shorthand for "counterintelligence program." COINTELPRO originated in the 1950s, to prevent socialist movements from developing in the United States, and the program rose to new heights in the Black Power era. Even prior to Stokely Carmichael's first calls for Black Power in 1966, the FBI was organizing to undermine civil rights movement efforts. The Black organizations they labeled as "militant' included not only Stokely's SNCC but also the Rev. Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group that never wavered in its dedication to nonviolent civil disobedience. Between 1963 and 1971, the FBI ran nearly three hundred separate COINTELPRO operations against Black nationalist groups, the majority of which targeted the Black Panther Party. The program's major goals were to: 1. Prevent the coalition of militant Black nationalist groups, as there would be strength in unity. 2. Prevent the rise of a "messiah" who could unify and electrify the movement, such as the Rev. Dr. King or Malcolm X. 3. Prevent violence, ideally by neutralizing movement leaders before they could become violent. 4. Prevent Black nationalist leaders from gaining respectability, ideally by discrediting them in the eyes of white people, Black people, and radicals of all races. 5. Prevent young people from joining the groups and increasing their membership base.

or he’s so good at acting he has us thinking that.” Marcel smiled back at him. “I like you, Thaddeus. We think a lot alike. Okay, what else we got?” “Uh-oh, jumping down here, look at this. Guy named Angelo Andrus. He’s FBI counter-intelligence. Why in the world would they have counter-intelligence listed as a witness, I wonder?” “That’s strange,” Turquoise pointed out. “That’s the same name Juan gave us a couple of days ago.” “In what context?” Thaddeus asked. Turquoise shrugged. “Basically, Juan said the word on the street is that he’s the key to this whole thing. If we start with him, we’ll find our answers.” “Counter-intelligence could be any number of things,” Marcel said. “In the context of the FBI investigation into Johann Van Giersbergen and the bomb explosion, it might be they’re looking into the possibility one of their agents was a double agent, or it could be as simple as Andrus was in charge of the terrorist investigation, the team the US sent here at the time.” “Are you saying they might be looking into an FBI agent who’s gone over to the other side? Say, he’s working with the Russians?” Thaddeus asked. “Yes, or the Chinese or the Iranians. It’s been known to happen.” Thaddeus moved the mouse and scrolled back up to the top of the witness list. “Let’s see who else we’ve got besides Angelo Andrus and see whether we can derive more context about him. Under federal law and the rules

Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the whites were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding.42 More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard.43 None of this proved to be the case. During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s the FBI was deeply invested in destabilizing and undermining grassroots organizations that it considered a threat to national security—as were the politicians, such as Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, who supported its efforts and relied on its briefings.44 One of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in this period—COINTELPRO—was notorious for using rumor and outright fabrication stories in an attempt to destroy leftist, antiwar, and civil rights groups from within. For this reason Commissioner Oswald’s determination to keep negotiating with the men in D Yard infuriated much of the Bureau. As one internal FBI memo put it, state officials had “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of prisoners.”45 And these weren’t just any criminals; as the FBI noted on multiple occasions, “The majority of the mutinous prisoners are black.”46 As dusk fell over D Yard on the first day of the Attica uprising, FBI and State Police rumors about black prisoners’ threats and outrageous actions only multiplied. But no matter how hostile everyone else was to the idea of the state negotiating with the prisoners, Commissioner Russell Oswald insisted even more forcefully that he was going to see these talks through.

The lengths his detractors would go were made clear in declassified FBI memoranda. J. Edgar Hoover authored a series of memos suggesting they “develop counter-intelligence measures to neutralize him [Gregory]. This should not be in the nature of an expose, since he already gets far too much publicity. Instead, sophisticated completely untraceable means of neutralizing Gregory should be developed.

From 1966 to 1976 ... The primary cause in [the] decline in FBI counterespionage and counterintelligence cases was the ceaseless demand by Presidents Johnson and Nixon to focus on the political warfare against the American left.... - "Espionage Against the United States by American Citizens, 1947-2001, Defense Personnel Security Research Center, July 2002

fight in America would cost him an average of one million dollars a day, at least, plus significant operating expenses from al-Matari’s cell, but if the end result meant America came to Iraq with boots on the ground, pushed back the Iranian hordes encroaching toward the south, ended pro-Iranian Alawite rule in Syria, and brought the price of oil back up to a level that would protect Saudi Arabian leadership’s domestic security . . . well, then, Sami bin Rashid would have done his job, and the King would reward him for life. A moment later INFORMER confirmed he received the money, and he told his customer to watch his mailbox in the dark web portal on his computer, and to wait for the files to come through. True to his word, INFORMER’s files began popping up, one by one. While bin Rashid clicked on the attachments, a smile grew inside his trim gray beard. First, the name, the address, and a photograph of a woman. A map of the area around where the woman lived. A CV of her work with the Defense Intelligence Agency, including foreign and domestic postings that would have her involved in the American campaign in the Middle East. Real-time intel about her daily commute, including the house where she would be watering the plants and checking the mail all week for a friend. Incredible, bin Rashid thought to himself. Where the hell is this coming from? The next file was all necessary targeting info on a recently retired senior CIA operations officer, who continued to work on a contract basis in the intelligence field. He spoke Arabic, trained others in tradecraft, counterintelligence,

One thing of interest in this regard is that in order to cover their tracks, specifically to explain where the money came from to cover Morris Childs’s considerable medical expenses, Jack concocted a fiction, which he spread among his former comrades. He told them that his brother’s treatment was paid for by the contributions of Party members. As he confided to his FBI handlers and Barron, “Almost none of these assholes will contribute a dime. But no one will ever say he didn’t contribute.”16 The subterfuge was apparently successful.

In the course of his informant career Morris Childs would come to be on a first-name basis with Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Mikhail Suslov (head of the Ideological Department of the Soviet Central Committee), and Boris Ponomarev (head of the International Department of the Soviet Central Committee), as well as meeting with MAO Zedong and Chou En Lai.19

The FBI had established an elegant stealth vehicle for undermining the Communist Party and its Maoist counterparts and all the evidence points to it having done its job well.

A page-turning story with a sophisticated plot not to be missed.

Another reason the longshoremen in Brooklyn were not talking to the navy was because President Roosevelt had declared that the country’s six hundred thousand nonnaturalized Italians be classified as “enemy aliens.” It was insulting, and it was an unwise move to offend the very people who were handling the materials that were being transported for war.3 By late February 1942, Haffenden and his section had failed to produce a single informant on the waterfront. Every officer at ONI had been trained to know that developing informants was essential for counterintelligence work, and on the waterfront, B-3 was coming up short.4

As for the groups that were the FBI targets, their response is instructive. Beyond the combination of disbelief, denial, and even acceptance of the Bureau’s assaults, was a mistaken view that a correct political line, the supremacy of their ideals, was sufficient to withstand the attacks – if not in the short run, then in the long. How that worked in practice is a lesson in repeated failure, one with historic precedent.

Their absence of political principal, of course, was undergirded by the fact that they were an FBI initiative. Put another way, whatever they wrote needed to be understood from the standpoint of what would advance the aims of the FBI,

Their ability to carry out a proper counterintelligence operation aimed at disrupting, if not destroying, a group largely hinged on the kind of intelligence only an informant could supply. And here we came to understand it was not just any informant – of which there were scores, or in the case of the CPUSA, hundreds.

As long as it was not fundamentally challenging US power or its global interests there was a level of tolerance of its existence. If it did challenge those interests all bets were off.

Crossfire Hurricane was a counterintelligence operation—to find out what Russia was doing, not to find out what the Trump campaign was doing. In other words, in the summer of 2016, the FBI was investigating Russian efforts to manipulate individuals within the Trump campaign, but not the Trump campaign itself.

the ancient British tradition of pointless interdepartmental rivalry, MI6 (responsible for intelligence overseas) still did not inform MI5 (responsible for counterespionage in the UK) of Pujol’s existence. Only a chance conversation between Tar Robertson and an MI6 officer from Lisbon alerted B1A to what was going on. Even then, MI6 was unwilling to allow Pujol to join the Double Cross team. “I do not see why I should get agents and have them pinched by you” was, according to Guy Liddell, the attitude taken by MI6’s head of counterintelligence. “The whole thing is so narrow and petty that it really makes me quite furious,” wrote Liddell.

He threw a dinner party in Popov’s honor and invited Jebsen, Aloys Schreiber (the new head of counterintelligence), and their secretaries. It was a bizarre occasion. Two of the guests were German intelligence officers, and two others were secretly working for British intelligence; Jebsen was sleeping with Schreiber’s secretary, who was spying on her boss; the married von Karsthoff was having an affair with his secretary, Elizabeth Sahrbach, while ripping off the Abwehr. Popov was conducting at least six love affairs.

This underscores a major and abusive flaw of the Trump–Russia investigation: In the absence of a solid factual predicate for a criminal investigation, foreign-counterintelligence powers were used as a pretext to dig for criminal evidence that would support a hoped-for prosecution.

In short, it was a mess. But not, apparently, an illegal mess.

During 2015 hackers repeatedly breached U.S. government computer systems. Not just the State Department, which seemed to be constantly ejecting unwanted intruders, but the Pentagon and the White House as well. Derek and I joked about how her private email probably was more secure than a State Department system, which we knew would have been hacked.

The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, responded by operating a covert counterintelligence program, known as COINTELPRO, that targeted civil rights leaders and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, who were deemed dangerous or suspected of Communist Party affiliation.

One of the most remarkable mind control texts I've come across is the 1963 CIA interrogation manual titled KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, recently made available through the Freedom of Information Act.9 The manual was designed to teach operatives "non-coercive" techniques for eliciting confessions and intelligence information from uncooperative detainees. What makes KUBARK so frightening is that it has no references to electric shocks or rubber hoses or other methods of torture. It's 100 percent applied social psychology.10

These groups have long been present in U.S. history. Above all, black and brown dissident groups—but also those from indigenous and Asian/Asian-American, as well as white communities—have arisen to challenge their communities’ dispossession. They are viewed by the state as in need of monitoring, control, even “neutralization,” to use FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s term for the destruction, division, defamation, and even death that the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) unleashed upon dissident groups in the 1970s and 1980s. U.S. officials also have often had to wage a veritable civil war against low-wage workers, farmers, and others; so much so, in fact, that historian Howard Zinn has referred to the big business war on labor as “The Other Civil War.

Agents and spies playing deep and dangerous games of intelligence and counterintelligence also soon made their way to the Ritz.

There was or is a control group buried within CIA counterintelligence or a part of CIA counterintelligence that has operational control over UFO

Phillips loved being on the operational end of the dirty-tricks business, playing the covert-action games, surreptitiously spinning hidden wheels to orchestrate the series of “coincidences” which would bring about a particular counterintelligence objective

By the same token, people today are resistant to the notion that by sharing dubious stories on Facebook, they're furthering the goals of a foreign adversary. Many people, in fact seem to resent the suggestion because of the intimation that they're gullible, easily tricked, or consciously aligned politically with that foreign adversary, even if none of those things are true.

If the international perception of our government could be reduced to our being transactionally corrupt, racist, intolerant, and opportunistic grifters, well, then we would be no different from all those we criticize—and no more alluring to would-be sources than our competitors in Russia and elsewhere.)

His was hardly the only source of information for the application; we had developed information about Page from a variety of sources over years of investigations.

Clearly he had not kept his relationship with the FBI confidential. That’s a key component of being a source, and we closed Steele as a result. It’s important to note that we did so because he was a control problem, not because his information was bad. He told others about his confidential relationship with

In the United States, about one in four adults uses Twitter. All of those people may be broadcasting what they had for breakfast or pictures of their cats, but many of them are also sending out links to articles and newscasts they agree with, retweets of people they admire, and political statements that may be trying to advance or enhance their view of their world.

While I was researching material for the editorial, I ran across a remarkable quote from George Washington that seemed chillingly prophetic, which began, “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of Republican Government.

The FBI is working closely with our federal, state, and local colleagues, asking them to double-check defenses, and to continue to apply the disinfectant of sunshine against foreign actors seeking to gain advantage from the shadows.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell voiced skepticism about the briefing and refused to issue a joint statement naming the Russians.

To emphasize the fact that the ICA had not relied on the Steele material for its conclusions about Russia’s intentions, the information was ultimately segregated into a separate addendum at the end of the briefing, to which only a smaller group of people would be privy. The decision was also a gesture of respect—an attempt to avoid embarrassing Trump. With a rueful Thanks, boss, Comey told us that Clapper wanted him to deliver the Steele information to Trump in the final, smaller portion of the briefing.

From a counterintelligence perspective, social media also makes it more difficult for people to recognize, let alone believe, that they've been duped. In the context of the analog, pre-internet intelligence world, most people prefer to believe that they're not working with an intelligence officer [of foreign adversary] even if they have suspicions. Most would rather believe, for example, that they have a friendship with a professor at a foreign university.

Mueller may have shuttered his office. DOJ may have declined various prosecutions, although, thankfully several investigations continue. Men and women vigilant to national security threats may have been chased out of public service, but the Russians are there, and they’re coming at our 2020 elections with a vengeance.

Our investigations revealed Donald Trump’s willingness to further the malign interests of one of our most formidable adversaries, apparently for his own personal gain. They also showed his willingness to accept political assistance from an opponent like Russia, and it follows, his willingness to subvert everything that America stands for. That’s not patriotic. It’s the opposite.

My high-level assessment would be this: we never obtained information to suggest that Steele was lying to us. We learned things about his source network that improved our understanding of aspects of the information. And some of his information did ultimately prove false, although we had no reason to suspect he knew it was inaccurate when he gave it to us.

Long before the hacked DNC emails were published, the Obama administration was speculating—whether out of partisanship or predisposition about Trump—that the Republican nominee was in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia to sabotage the election. When the hacked DNC emails were published, Obama officials distorted Papadopoulos’s gossipy statements to an Australian diplomat—which the diplomat himself had initially dismissed as nonsense—into the formal rationalization for commencing a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that they had already been conducting.

The Obama administration, notoriously political in its intelligence assessments and law-enforcement actions, used Trump contacts with Russia as a rationalization for a counterintelligence investigation because it saw Trump as a Neanderthal degenerate.

The investigative theory on which the FBI formally opened the foreign-counterintelligence probe code-named “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31, 2016, held that (a) the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit in, Russia’s possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and (b) in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time maximally damaging to Clinton’s campaign.

Equally worrisome was the way Trump used information from Russian affiliated sites on the campaign trail. We didn’t think it was necessarily nefarious. He just amplified evidence to buttress a viewpoint, however wild or incredible, that he wanted to insert into the debate. But it troubled us that he was willing to use what amounted to Russian disinformation in pursuit of those ends. The information wasn’t coming from CNN or FOX. It was coming from places like RT and Sputnik. Outlets that were clearly closely affiliated with Russia. Similarly, we knew that WIKILEAKS had released material that the Russian government had stolen from the DNC and the Clinton campaign. By late summer 2016, the public did too, thanks to reports in the press. But Trump and his campaign, didn’t seem to care. The stolen material was helpful to them and he mentioned it, a lot. Over the course of 2016, Trump made reference to WIKILEAKS over 135 times on the campaign trail. From a counterintelligence perspective, it was problematic that a presidential candidate would use material stolen by a hostile foreign adversary for his own political gain. From a patriotic perspective, I wasn’t just worried about a candidate relying on actors outside the US to help his presidential prospects, I was repulsed.

I also cannot conceive of a sadder testament to Trump’s America: fringe elements of a nation, governed by violent invective and vindictive fury. The President’s vitriol posed a physical threat to his targets, which now included me, my children, and my wife.

We could only hope that Trump’s restraint, deliberate or unwitting, would continue, and although he might be tempted to interfere yet again in the investigations into him, our commander in chief would abide by both common sense and the unwritten rules about acceptable presidential behavior that had guided all his predecessors. Yet, deep down, we knew that he probably wouldn’t.

It laid out what Russia was doing, noting that while the tactics were new, Russian attempts at election interference were not, and urging Americans to think carefully about all the news and social media they were consuming. While I was researching material for the editorial, I ran across a remarkable quote from George Washington that seemed chillingly prophetic, which began, “against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, I conjure you to believe me, fellow citizens, that jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.

After the Russian Civil War, Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence officers would pride themselves on being nondescript. They wore suits and ties. They shaved. They got haircuts. They were no more tough-looking than anybody else you saw on the street. Under Dzerzhinsky, though, a menacing appearance was de rigueur for a headhunter. That included a heavy beard stubble. All Bolsheviks who weren’t at a top level were supposed to look shoddy, DeWitt Poole later wrote.

Kevin Shipp, a former CIA counterintelligence expert, and Lopez both agreed that the gunrunning operation bordered on treasonous activity and is a secret the Obama White House and Clinton State Department sought to suppress from the public. In the “Blue Lantern” program, the