Intel Wars (8 page)

The Clandestine Service's performance prior to 9/11
had left something to be desired. General Montgomery C. Meigs, former commander of U.S. Army forces in Europe, recalled that during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, the CIA's clandestine intelligence gathering efforts were, in his opinion, “amateurish.”

By 2009, the dark days were behind the Clandestine Service. Its budget had been dramatically augmented, and its personnel were now operating from stations in 250 U.S. embassies and consulates in almost 170 countries. These CIA stations varied in size from over 700 officers in Afghanistan to a single officer and a secretary in the smaller Pacific Island republics. And the NCS was still growing rapidly. Hundreds of newly minted case officers were being churned out at the agency's 10,000-acre training center, colloquially known as “the Farm,” outside Williamsburg, Virginia, and sent to overseas stations as fast as orders could be drawn up.

A small but growing number of these newly minted agents were NOCs, which stands for nonofficial cover. These agents are posted overseas without any diplomatic cover, pretending to be businessmen, financial analysts, technical translators, and the like. According to former NCS head Mike Sulick, these NOCs are becoming increasingly important because “
diplomatic cover isn't going to get
you access to the targets you need to reach in today's war on terrorism.”

Senior intelligence officials are fond of repeating the truism that the CIA's failures are well known, but its successes are not. Behind the scenes, the CIA was enjoying an unprecedented level of success not seen since the halcyon days of the Cold War. According to information contained in a number of leaked State Department cables placed online by WikiLeaks, as of 2009 the CIA was providing valuable intelligence reporting from inside the governments of a number of America's allies. For instance, in the Middle East and South Asia, the CIA had a plethora of high-level sources in countries such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, while in Latin America, the agency was operating high-level penetration agents inside the governments and security forces of countries such as Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Paraguay, and Venezuela.

Occasionally news about the agency's major successes leaks out. Prior to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1, 2011, the CIA's biggest public success had occurred in June 2010, when the FBI arrested ten Russian sleeper agents the bureau had been watching for almost a decade. All ten of the agents and their families were sent back to Russia as part of a swap for a Russian scientist named Igor V. Sutyagin, who had been imprisoned for allegedly spying for the United States.

Five months later, on November 11, 2010, the Russian newspaper
Kommersant
published an article alleging that the sleeper agents had been betrayed by a Russian intelligence official identified only as “Colonel Shcherbakov,” who had been the head of the North American illegals branch of the Russian foreign intelligence service (Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, or SVR). “Shcherbakov” was in fact Colonel Alexander Poteyev, who had been recruited by the CIA more than a decade earlier when he was posted to the United States. According to a senior U.S. intelligence official, Poteyev had provided the agency with “extremely valuable” information about Soviet spying activities in the United States before he was exfiltrated from Russia by the CIA in June 2010.

The CIA was only one of twenty-one different government agencies or military commands engaged in conducting clandestine human intelligence. Virtually every major U.S. military overseas command had its own clandestine human intelligence gathering units, which operated largely independent of the CIA. For example, the Joint Special Operations Command based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was operating small agent networks in support of its highly classified commando operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Even the electronic eavesdroppers at the National Security Agency (NSA) had their own secret HUMINT collection teams called Target Exploitation (TAREX) detachments, which interrogated prisoners and examined captured codes, communications equipment, and documents to try to help NSA's codebreakers solve enemy code and cipher systems, or conversely, protect U.S. communications and codes from being broken and exploited by the other side.

The CIA's military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was the intelligence arm of the Department of Defense, producing intelligence reporting for the secretary of defense's office, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior U.S. military commanders around the world. Long considered by intelligence insiders as the “lightweight” of the intelligence community because of the historically poor quality of the material that it produced, the DIA had grown dramatically since 9/11 from 7,500 military and civilian personnel to over 16,500 in 2009, reflecting a surge in the importance of military intelligence.

Even before 9/11, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had become a veritable powerhouse inside the U.S. intelligence community, investigating potential terrorist threats at home and abroad, as well as its more usual work of monitoring the activities of foreign intelligence agencies and their operatives in the United States and investigating violations of federal criminal and civil statutes. Since 9/11, the bureau has continued to grow in both size and power. With 33,925 employees, including 13,492 special agents who did the investigative work, by 2009 the FBI had become one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world, operating fifty-six field offices and four hundred resident agency offices throughout the United States.
There were also a couple of hundred FBI agents
assigned to more than sixty “Legal Attaché” offices in U.S. embassies overseas who not only liaised with their foreign counterparts but also actively collected intelligence on a wide range of foreign terrorist and organized crime groups, such as the Pakistani Taliban and the Russian mafia.

The FBI even had its own air force. As of 2009, the FBI's Aviation and Surveillance Branch, headed by Special Agent James F. “Jim” Yacone, was flying 132 surveillance aircraft and helicopters from more than two dozen medium-sized regional airports throughout the United States, making the FBI's fleet larger than most European air forces.
According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records
, all of the FBI's aircraft are owned by six Delaware front companies, while the bureau's fleet of helicopters is owned by another dummy corporation in Manassas, Virginia.

From its modern headquarters complex a few miles south of Dulles International Airport in Chantilly, Virginia, since 1961 the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) has designed, built, and operated all of the American reconnaissance satellites that are currently in orbit over the earth. Although its headquarters staff is, by Washington standards, very small and compact, with only 3,000 government employees, NRO has by far the largest budget of any agency in the intelligence community and a reputation for wasteful spending to go with it.

Unlike its larger cousins
, the CIA and NSA, the NRO does not produce any intelligence information itself. Rather, according to declassified NRO documents, all of the vast amount of photo and radar imagery and intercepted signals collected by its spy satellites are beamed down to earth in near realtime to a series of heavily guarded NRO facilities called mission ground stations located at Buckley Air Force Base, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Fort Belvoir, Virginia, in the United States; and RAF Menwith Hill Station in England and the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap outside Alice Springs, Australia. The data is then forwarded to the other branches of the U.S. intelligence community responsible for analysis.

One of the agencies responsible for analyzing NRO's satellite data is the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), whose headquarters is located in a complex of buildings on Sangamore Road in Bethesda, Maryland, across from a shopping mall. The principal mission of NGA's 16,000 employees is to review and analyze all of the imagery that NRO's satellites generate, as well as make thousands of detailed maps of the entire globe for use by the U.S. government and military.

During every Washington Nationals home game, tens of thousands of baseball fans unknowingly walk right by one of NGA's most sensitive facilities. Located on the corner of M and 1st streets in southeast Washington, D.C., is a multistory, windowless structure called Building 213, which houses the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), where all imagery taken by American photo reconnaissance satellites is processed, analyzed, and reported on. By the end of September 2011, NPIC and all other NGA facilities in suburban Maryland and Virginia, as well as the District of Columbia, will have moved to a new headquarters complex currently under construction at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

As it was during the Cold War
, satellite imagery remains an important source for the U.S. intelligence community. For example, in 2009 the Ukrainian government denied that it had shipped T-72 medium tanks to Sudan in violation of U.S. economic sanctions that barred the shipment of weapons to the regime in Khartoum. At a meeting with their Ukrainian counterparts, State Department officials pulled out sanitized satellite photos showing the T-72 tanks being offloaded at the port of Mombasa in Kenya from a Ukrainian merchant ship, then loaded onto rail flatcars, and finally being delivered to a military garrison in southern Sudan. According to a leaked State Department cable summarizing the meeting, the production of the satellite photos led to “a commotion on the Ukrainian side” of the negotiating table.

However, the U.S. intelligence community's heavy reliance on these spy satellites to see what was taking place deep inside hostile territory has over time eroded as America's enemies learned how to hide their most sensitive military facilities from the cameras on the satellites. Countries like Iran and North Korea, for example, had become quite adept at burying their sensitive nuclear weapons and ballistic missile production facilities underground, thereby denying the satellites access to what was going on inside the plants.

With more than 60,000 military and civilian employees eavesdropping on all forms of electronic communications around the world, the National Security Agency was the nation's largest and most powerful intelligence agency. Like the rest of the intelligence community, NSA had completely reengineered itself since 9/11, when the agency was so fraught with problems that its deputy director for operations at the time, Richard Taylor, admitted that “
NSA was a shambles
.” SIGINT had been in rapid decline throughout the 1990s because new telecommunications technologies, like fiber-optic cables and cellular telephones, were being introduced faster than NSA's ability to design and field equipment to monitor them.
According to General Montgomery Meigs
, during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, the ability of the NSA to intercept enemy radio traffic became increasingly difficult because in 1998 the Bosnian Serbs moved their most sensitive communications to a secure fiber-optic cable system that NSA could not intercept, and in Kosovo in 1999 the Yugoslav military used cell phones to direct their military operations, which NSA was not equipped at the time to monitor.

By 2009, though, NSA had changed dramatically. The agency still had about a dozen large listening posts in the United States and overseas, like the massive intercept site at Menwith Hill in northern England, which today sucks up thousands of radio messages and telephone calls every day from throughout the Middle East and Near East, including Israel and Iran.
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But the majority of NSA's SIGINT effort remained focused on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the surrounding area. At Balad Air Base in Iraq, and Bagram and Kandahar airfields in Afghanistan, SIGINT aircraft took off around the clock to monitor insurgent radio and cell phone communications. On the ground there were dozens of small but very secretive SIGINT units manned by military personnel running around the countryside with oblique names like Joint Expeditionary SIGINT Terminal Response Unit, Cryptologic Support Teams, SIGINT Terminal Guidance Units, and Signal Survey Teams.

In the American zone in southeastern Afghanistan there were almost a dozen tiny military SIGINT units called Low-Level Voice Intercept (LLVI) Teams, made up of four linguists who were trained to listen to the walkie-talkie chatter of Taliban fighters. In a 2010 interview at his home in Texas, an army SIGINT intercept operator just returned from a one-year tour of duty in Afghanistan recalled that his classified technical training was straightforward. “I just had to learn all the words and phrases used by the Taliban for ‘IED,' ‘bomb,' ‘gun,' ‘open fire,' and ‘kill the infidels,'” he said. The work of these LLVI teams was extremely dangerous because, in some cases, the enemy fighters they were listening to were hiding only a few hundred yards away, requiring that the intercept operators perform their missions while firing on the enemy they were monitoring at the same time.

With eighty-seven offices in sixty-three countries around the world, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) ran a surprisingly large and diverse series of clandestine intelligence collection programs in places like Mexico, Colombia, and Afghanistan. The DEA station in Afghanistan was running networks of informants in Helmand and Kandahar provinces trying to uncover links between the Taliban guerrillas and Afghan narcotics kingpins, all independent of the CIA's intelligence-gathering efforts. The DEA even had its own sophisticated SIGINT collection system for listening to the telephone calls of narco-traffickers, including a state-of-the-art cell phone intercept system called Matador.
In 2009, the president of Panama
, Ricardo Alberto Martinelli, threatened to expel the entire DEA station unless the Americans agreed to his demand that they use Matador to tap the phones of his domestic political opponents.

The Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) small Office of Intelligence and Analysis in Washington was not a collection agency. Rather, it acted as a central clearinghouse for intelligence information about potential terrorist threats to the United States.
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DHS's intelligence organization was deeply troubled. General Patrick M. Hughes recalled that when he took over the organization in November 2003, it consisted of only
“27 people, no capability—a total mess.”
By April 2004, things were somewhat better, but not much. According to Hughes, the DHS intelligence database had “nothing in it,” and DHS officials could not be given the best intelligence available to the U.S. intelligence community because the department was not yet authorized to receive SIGINT from NSA. As will be seen in chapter 6, by 2009 the DHS intelligence organization had made significant strides in rectifying these and a host of other problems, but it was still not fully functional.