Tracking Secret Operatives Not Too Tough

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: March 12, 2006 9:14:19 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Tracking Secret Operatives Not Too Tough
Reply-To: dewayne () warpspeed com

[Note:  This item comes from reader Randall.  DLH]

> From: Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>
> Date: March 11, 2006 9:39:16 PM PST
> To: Dave <dave () farber net>, Dewayne Hendricks  
> <dewayne () warpspeed com>,  Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>, JMG  
> <johnmacsgroup () yahoogroups com>
> 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 () tribune com
>
> <http://tinyurl.com/qhe2d>

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