How About We Spend Less Time Talking About Compiling Lists of Spies And More Time Arresting Them?

The New York Times reports that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence wants to compile a master database of everyone we know or suspect of spying for a foreign power. The CIA and the FBI are responding by telling the DNI that is a terrible idea and will inevitably lead to the compromise of sources and operations.

CIA and FBI are right.

So is the DNI.

The DNI is trying to get the CIA and FBI in the game and doing something about the massive counterintelligence threat in this country. The bet is that forcing CIA and FBI to actually come clean about what they know AND WHAT THEY DO NOT KNOW may spur them into action. One can see why thinking would run that way, because nothing else has worked to date.

The CIA and the FBI are pointing out the obvious. You can’t run ops by committee. As soon as more than a few people know a secret, it stops being a secret really fast. Particularly when you are hunting spies inside the government, compartmentation is everything.

Here’s the problem.

Domestic counterintelligence is the province of the FBI. The FBI is a law enforcement organization. Special agents are cops. Cops investigate crimes that have already occurred. You knock over a bank, and then they start investigating and try to build a case against you.

Counterintelligence doesn’t work that way. All intelligence has to be forward-leaning. You have to play offense. You don’t wait until something bad happens. You get ahead of the curve, recruit sources, and prevent something nefarious from ever happening.

The FBI is bad at that. It has always been bad at that. If you read the Venona Papers, the summary of the decrypted communications between Soviet agents in the United States from the 1930’s through the Cold War, you see that the Russians ate our lunch. They had so many sources inside the senior levels of the Roosevelt administration that they were literally running into each other. The Kremlin could not keep track of all the spies it had on our soil.

The Russians had the Manhattan Project penetrated six ways from Sunday. When they decided to build their own atomic bomb, it was literally a copy of ours, down to the size and location of the bolts to hold the thing together.

The Russians are pikers compared to the Chinese, who have an ongoing espionage campaign in this country that boggles the mind. They are running amok. The Iranians have their people inside our national security apparatus. Other supposedly friendly foreign powers are picking our pockets with abandon.

Every once in a while we arrest some solitary figure of marginal importance and congratulate ourselves on having done something of consequence.

CIA is at least as ineffectual.

John Brennan did not just pursue disastrous policies and politicize the Agency. He broke its structure. He took an organization dominated by operations officers, focused on recruiting human sources, and transformed it into a bureaucracy run by apparatchiks and mainly paper-shuffling drones. He took away its elan. He drained it of its lifeforce.

Nothing has changed under Director Ratcliffe. No one has been fired. None of Brennan’s structural changes have been rolled back. The public conceives of the CIA as being operators working in the shadows and recruiting sources in all the dangerous dark places on the planet. The truth is that those in control are increasingly technocrats and project managers who might as well be managing Chipotle’s latest expansion plans.

Ratcliffe recently announced his newest initiative at CIA. Yes, you guessed it. He is dedicated to making sure the Agency “onboards” AI and other tech more quickly. And, of course, he has changed the names of some offices. Always key.

Somewhere in Iran, there are IRGC officers having misgivings about their nation’s policies in the Middle East. They don’t want to be part of a messianic plot to blow up the world. Some of them and their colleagues in the Iranian MOIS (Ministry of Intelligence and Security) know the identities of Iranian “sleeper agents” on our soil and Iranian plans to attack targets inside the United States. Nobody is talking to them. The committees at CIA Headquarters that pass for operational components now are busy “onboarding” more tech and generating more process.

Out there in our laboratories and on our college campuses are literally hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens, all of whom are compelled to act as agents for the CCP. Many of them would be more than happy to have an opportunity, if they could do so securely, to work against their masters, help us win this fight against totalitarianism, and maybe, just maybe, earn themselves a chance to stay here on U.S. soil and live free.

No one is talking to them. Instead, our people are squabbling over process and databases and planning yet another study of the size of the hole below the waterline in the hull of the ship we call democracy.

Here’s my advice to the DNI, the FBI, the CIA, and everyone else in the Intelligence Community. How about we spend less time talking about compiling lists of spies and more time arresting them?