From: Randall <rvh40@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: March 11, 2006 9:39:16 PM PST
To: Dave <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>, Dewayne Hendricks
<dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Declan McCullagh <declan@xxxxxxxx>, JMG
<johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Tracking Secret Operatives Not Too Tough
<http://htdaw.blogsource.com/post.mhtml?post_id=276539>
Sunday, March 12, 2006 at 12:37 AM EST
Internet blows CIA cover
It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you need to
know is
how to navigate the Internet
..By John Crewdson
Tribune senior correspondent
March 11, 2006, 12:00 PM CST
WASHINGTON -- She is 52 years old, married, grew up in the Kansas City
suburbs and now lives in Virginia, in a new three-bedroom house.
Anyone who can qualify for a subscription to one of the online
services
that compile public information also can learn that she is a CIA
employee who, over the past decade, has been assigned to several
American embassies in Europe.
The CIA asked the Tribune not to publish her name because she is a
covert operative, and the newspaper agreed. But unbeknown to the CIA,
her affiliation and those of hundreds of men and women like her have
somehow become a matter of public record, thanks to the Internet.
When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result
was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal
agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret
CIA
facilities around the United States.
Only recently has the CIA recognized that in the Internet age its
traditional system of providing cover for clandestine employees
working
overseas is fraught with holes, a discovery that is said to have
"horrified" CIA Director Porter Goss.
"Cover is a complex issue that is more complex in the Internet age,"
said the CIA's chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Dyck. "There are things
that
worked previously that no longer work. Director Goss is committed to
modernizing the way the agency does cover in order to protect our
officers who are doing dangerous work."
Dyck declined to detail the remedies "since we don't want the bad guys
to know what we're fixing."
Several "front companies" set up to provide cover for CIA
operatives and
its small fleet of aircraft recently began disappearing from the
Internet, following the Tribune's disclosures that some of the planes
were used to transport suspected terrorists to countries where they
claimed to have been tortured.
Although finding and repairing the vulnerabilities in the CIA's cover
system was not a priority under Goss' predecessor, George Tenet, one
senior U.S. official observed that "the Internet age didn't get
here in
2004," the year Goss took over at the CIA.
CIA names not disclosed
The Tribune is not disclosing the identities of any of the CIA
employees
uncovered in its database searches, the searching techniques used or
other details that might put agency employees or operatives at
risk. The
CIA apparently was unaware of the extent to which its employees
were in
the public domain until being provided with a partial list of names by
the Tribune.'
At a minimum, the CIA's seeming inability to keep its own secrets
invites questions about whether the Bush administration is doing
enough
to shield its covert CIA operations from public scrutiny, even as the
Justice Department focuses resources on a two-year investigation into
whether someone in the administration broke the law by disclosing to
reporters the identity of clandestine CIA operative Valerie Plame.
Not all of the 2,653 employees whose names were produced by the
Tribune
search are supposed to be working under cover. More than 160 are
intelligence analysts, an occupation that is not considered a covert
position, and senior CIA executives such as Tenet are included on the
list.
Covert employees discovered
But an undisclosed number of those on the list--the CIA would not say
how many--are covert employees, and some are known to hold jobs that
could make them terrorist targets.
Other potential targets include at least some of the two dozen CIA
facilities uncovered by the Tribune search. Most are in northern
Virginia, within a few miles of the agency's headquarters. Several are
in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah and Washington state. There is
one
in Chicago.
Some are heavily guarded. Others appear to be unguarded private
residences that bear no outward indication of any affiliation with the
CIA.
A senior U.S. official, reacting to the computer searches that
produced
the names and addresses, said, "I don't know whether Al Qaeda could do
this, but the Chinese could."
Down on "The Farm"
For decades the CIA's training facility at Camp Peary, Va., near
historic Williamsburg, remained the deepest of secrets. Even after
former CIA personnel confirmed its existence in the 1980s the agency
never acknowledged the facility publicly, and CIA personnel
persisted in
referring to it in conversation only as "The Farm."
But an online search for the term "Camp Peary" produced the names and
other details of 26 individuals who according to the data are employed
there. Searching aviation databases for flights landing or taking off
from Camp Peary's small airstrip revealed 17 aircraft whose ownership
and flight histories could also be traced.
Although the Tribune's initial search for "Central Intelligence
Agency"
employees turned up only work-related addresses and phone numbers,
other
Internet-based services provide, usually for a fee but sometimes for
free, the home addresses and telephone numbers of U.S. residents, as
well as satellite photographs of the locations where they live and
work.
Asked how so many personal details of CIA employees had found their
way
into the public domain, the senior U.S. intelligence official replied
that "I don't have a great explanation, quite frankly."
The official noted, however, that the CIA's credo has always been that
"individuals are the first person responsible for their cover. If they
can't keep their cover, then it's hard for anyone else to keep it. If
someone filled out a credit report and put that down, that's just
stupid."
One senior U.S. official used a barnyard epithet to describe the
agency's traditional system of providing many of its foreign
operatives
with easily decipherable covers that include little more than a post
office box for an address and a non-existent company as an employer.
Coverts especially important
And yet, experts say, covert operatives who pose as something other
than
diplomats are becoming increasingly important in the global war on
terror.
"In certain areas you just can't collect the kind of information you
need in the 21st Century by working out of the embassy. They're
just not
going to meet the kind of people they need to meet," said Melvin
Goodman, who was a senior Soviet affairs analyst at the CIA for more
than 20 years before he retired.
The problem, Goodman said, is that transforming a CIA officer who has
worked under "diplomatic cover" into a "non-official cover"
operator, or
NOC--as was attempted with Valerie Plame--creates vulnerabilities that
are not difficult to spot later on.
The CIA's challenge, in Goodman's view, is, "How do you establish a
cover for them in a day and age when you can Google a name ... and
find
out all sorts of holes?"
In Plame's case, online computer searches would have turned up her
tenure as a junior diplomat in the U.S. Embassy in Athens even
after she
began passing herself off as a privately employed "energy consultant."
The solution, Goodman suggested, is to create NOCs at the very
outset of
their careers, "taking risks with younger people, worrying about the
reputation of people before they have one. Or create one."
Shortage of `mentors'
But that approach also has a downside, in that "you're getting into
the
problem of very junior, inexperienced people, which a lot of
veteran CIA
people feel now is part of the problem. Porter Goss has to double the
number of operational people in an environment where there are no
mentors. Who's going to train these people?"
In addition to stepping up recruiting, Goss has ordered a "top-down"
review of the agency's "tradecraft" following the disclosure that
several supposedly covert operatives involved in the 2003 abduction
of a
radical Muslim preacher in Milan had registered at hotels under their
true names and committed other amateurish procedural violations that
made it relatively easy for the Italian police to identify them and
for
Italian prosecutors to charge them with kidnapping.
-----
Tribune researcher Brenda J. Kilianski contributed to this article
from
Chicago.
jcrewdson@xxxxxxxxxxx
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