[Dewayne-Net] Tracking Secret Operatives Not Too Tough

Sun Mar 12 06:14:19 PST 2006

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

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

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