The Daily - A Troubling C.I.A. Admission

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

The C.I.A. sent a short but explosive message last week to all of its stations and bases around the world.The cable, which said dozens of sources had been arrested, killed or turned against the United States, highlights the struggle the agency is having as it works to recruit spies around the world. How did this deterioration occur?Guest: Julian E. Barnes, a national security reporter for The New York Times. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Counterintelligence officials said in a top secret cable to all stations and bases around the world that too many of the people it recruits from other countries to spy for the U.S. are being lost.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Ested Herndon. This is The Daily. Today, in a leaked cable, the CIA made an explosive admission that the agency has lost dozens of informants to foreign enemies. My colleague, Julian Barnes, on why the failures happened and how the CIA got sloppy at its own game. It's Friday, October 8th. Julian, can you tell me about this secret CIA message? Yeah. Last week, the CIA sent a worldwide message to all of its stations and bases around the globe. So every place there is a CIA officer stationed, they got a copy of this relatively short but pretty explosive cable. And the message was that there is a real problem with CIA informants being arrested, killed, or compromised. arrested, killed, or compromised.

And what was unusual is this is usually, you know, the kind of information that's, you know, the most closely held secret. So it sounds like the CIA's version of sending up a flare, saying, we are acknowledging that we are losing our people. Is that a fair way to characterize it? That's a great way to characterize it. This was something where the CIA was trying to get the attention of its officers, its case officers who run informants, who develop sources, who collect the intelligence the

U.S. relies on. It wanted their attention. It wanted them to focus on it. And it wanted it not to just be this sort of standard reminder, but get people's attention by being very specific about the scope of the problem. So what is the scope of that problem? Well, we're talking about dozens of informants over several years that have been lost to the United States. And losing people can be an informant is arrested and no longer can talk to the United States because the source is now in a prison overseas. because the source is now in a prison overseas.

It also can mean that the source is executed, as many countries will promptly kill somebody suspected of being a spy for the United States. And then there's a third, more complicated category, and these people are still talking to the United States, but the U.S. can't trust that they haven't been turned. And so the informant is useless. Do we know what the proportion of people who are in any of those categories, have more of them been arrested, have more of them died,? Have more of them been arrested? Have more of them died? Or have more of them been turned? So we're not putting out specific numbers

for security reasons. Okay. But we can tell you the biggest category is those double agents, the people who are in the suspected-to-be-turned category. So, Julian, when you saw the cable, what was your reaction? My reaction was that this problem was bigger than we understood, that there were real problems with the CIA's spycraft. Maybe there is something systemically wrong. And if that's the case, it's a really big deal. we use to avoid war or avoid conflicts or smooth out international relations to, you

know, make the United States safer in theory. And so my reaction was, this is a big deal. If the U.S. is losing its edge, that matters. edge, that matters. And the more we learned about this cable,ation occur? Well, I think of it in two broad categories of what's going on here. And the first is how the world has changed. In what way? Well, first and foremost, with technology, there is a dramatic change in all kinds of technology, communications, artificial intelligence, facial recognition, some broad categories that make it really, really difficult to be a spy in the modern world. Wait, what does that look like? How has technology impacted the abilities for spies to operate? Well, let's think back to classic spy movies or classic spy novels.

You know, the Red Sparrow novels, they talk about American spies in Moscow going to meet a source, spending hours trying to elude the KGB or FSB tail, and that they were just doing all these elaborate moves to lose the tail, to go black in the parlance of the CIA. to go black in the parlance of the CIA. Get just a few minutes to be alone with the source and do a brush pass or do a dead drop or get a little bit more time and actually have a conversation. I'm getting Jason Bourne images. Yeah, exactly. Jason Bourne, 007 blows more stuff up.

But that classic spy tale. The problem is you can't do any of that. Jason Bourne has three passports, five passports. 007 opens a drawer, takes out a new passport. Well, guess what? You go into a foreign country,

they're going to scan your retina. Like, you can't scan your retina. Like, you can't change your retina. The whole three passports thing doesn't work anymore. And, you know, walking around Beijing trying to lose the tail, there's cameras everywhere. They're connected to the world's most powerful facial recognition and AI software that is identifying people. And so this technological change means it's way, way harder to be a spy these days. With that constant surveillance in this big brother world that we now live in, is that the main way in which the landscape has changed around the U.S. and the CIA? That's an important way it's changed.

But, you know, the other way it's changed is we have the development of some really, really good counterintelligence services in the world from places that weren't always thought of as having the best spy services, right? I mean, classically, you know, the KGB and the successor organizations, the SVR and the FSB were the great spies and the great spy hunters. But it's not just Russia anymore that is really good at this. Iran has some of the best counterintelligence operations there are. They have destroyed the American network inside that country. Pakistan, turns out, is really, really good at finding American informants. And time and time again, they have broken down our networks, penetrated our networks, turned our sources. And those turned sources feed us bad information,

and that leads to bad intelligence. So we cannot just assume that the traditional powers are the only ones who know how to do this. And we really need to understand that other countries are getting better at this and maybe better than we are. Well, if they're getting better, doesn't that put more pressure on the United States to also match that, to also be at the top of its game? States to also match that, to also be at the top of its game? Yeah, absolutely it does. But the reality of the situation is that the CIA has gotten sloppy. We'll be right back.

Okay, Julian, you said that the CIA got sloppy. What do you mean? Well, that kind of leads us to the second big category of what went wrong. We let our spy craft slip. And you have to remember the wider context here. You know, what has the CIA been doing over the last 20 years? They've been fighting terrorism. That's what the focus of the United States was. After 9-11, counterterrorism became the most important issue. The war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, the war in Syria, the threat of al-Qaeda, the threat of Islamic State. And, you know, it turns out that it's actually a different thing to try to collect information against another country,

another country that operates its own counterintelligence service that is watching for spies, has got a whole group of people trying to catch spies, and has kind of huge resources to try to counter the CIA. has kind of huge resources to try to counter the CIA. How is it that collecting information against another country is different or harder than against some of these terrorism organizations that the U.S. has been focusing on, you know, groups like ISIS? Yeah, I mean, ISIS probably is looking for moles.

They're probably trying to figure out what of their people are loyal to them. But they don't have the same means to monitor people, right? That is not something that al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in most cases have the ability to do. I mean, if you are a nation state, you can listen to phone calls in your country. You can listen to phone calls in other countries. You can follow cell phones. And so, you know, protecting informants, developing informants inside a potentially adversarial country requires more care. It requires extra layers of protection. It requires teaching your informants to be spies, right? Yeah. It sounds like you're saying that the muscles that the CIA

developed during the Cold War era, that they became synonymous with, that spycraft and counterintelligence, that they may have lost some of that when they started focusing so much on counterterrorism. Is that the main way the CIA sort of let its spycraft slip, or is there another? That's one way. The other way is kind of a subset of that, of mission over security. What's that mean? Well, it's kind of like quantity over quality. Maybe that's a way to think about it. You know, if you're a CIA case officer, those are the people who go overseas and recruit new informants. You know, former officials tell us the way you get promoted is you bring in new sources and you would have a successful tour if you developed

10 new sources, you know, three in the Ministry of Defense and two, you know, in the Central Bank and three other well-connected business people. But what experts have told us is, you know, quantity is great, but if a couple of those people get caught, then your whole network can get taken down. And you have to, instead of focusing on the numbers, you have to take the extra time to do the vetting, to make sure the people you are recruiting really are on the side of the United States, really are working to help the CIA develop its information, and not double agents, not people working for the adversarial country. There is a classic example that former officials will say that is the sort of worst case scenario. In 2009, the CIA was recruiting a

Jordanian doctor to infiltrate al-Qaeda, to collect information and bring it back to the United States. They arranged for that doctor to go to the secret base that the CIA operated in Afghanistan, Camp Chapman in East Afghanistan. They were so eager to meet the source, to hear what he had to say, and not offend the source, to keep on their good side, that the security checks, the pat-downs were lax. The person got into the base to meet with a CIA agent. Al-Qaeda had turned that person. The person was now working for Al-Qaeda. He had become a suicide bomber, set off the bomb, seven agency officers were killed. Wow. It was one of the most devastating days in CIA history.

And, you know, former officials say a classic example of mission over security. The risks of a turned informant can be catastrophic in ways you can't really imagine. And that is why it is so important to take the painful steps and to always keep security at the forefront of your mind. Wow. This is the exact type of tragedy that the cable points to. The real risk that comes with this type of spycraft. That's exactly right. And despite those risks, the human asset is still really important to the CIA. The kind of intelligence you get from another person is really important. And it is

information that you can't always get from a stolen document or an intercepted phone call. Is there an example when this type of intelligence outweighed the human risk? There's one really important example, and that is the 2016 election and Russian interference. And one of the key findings that the CIA made was that Vladimir Putin favored Donald Trump. This was, as you'll recall, a controversial finding. Not all Republicans agreed with that. They felt that Russia was just trying to cause chaos. But it turns out that the reason the CIA knew about that, in part, was a human source. They had somebody who was in some meetings with Putin. And Vladimir Putin doesn't use cell phones. He doesn't let a lot of documents get created with his thinking on them. It's really hard to understand his intentions, his thinking. And the way to do

that is to get sources close to him. People who have been in meetings with him have heard him talk with advisors. And this asset was really important to the CIA making that judgment. was really important to the CIA making that judgment. Now, that asset was also an example of someone who was lost. In this case, though, the CIA extracted that operative from Russia and brought him to Northern Virginia to make sure he didn't get caught, to make sure he didn't get turned. So I can see how this shows the value of that human intelligence. But if the CIA has already been so sloppy, and we've lost a number of spies to these countries as a result,

what happens if the CIA is not successful in reshifting its focus to protecting these human assets? I mean, that's an interesting question, right? Because what would happen if all the human sources dried up or went away? What if we were just dependent on the information we can get from spy satellites and intercepted phone calls? and intercepted phone calls, we wouldn't be completely blind. But I think what the CIA would tell you is, if we don't get this right, we'll lose some nuance. And in intelligence, nuance is really important. And when we get the nuance wrong, we make bad policy decisions. So I think if we had Bill Burns on here with us, the director of the CIA, he would tell you, you know, we're going to make sure we get this right and we continue

to develop these networks and we will find a way to do it. This question might seem out of left field, but is it clear that when the U.S. has more spies out there, that if Bill Burns were here and said, we're going to do better on this front, that it's causational that the world will then be safer? How do we know that the security vision that the CIA is pitching here is actually a good one? That's a pretty deep question. I mean, yeah, but it's an important question. I mean, certainly there are people who would believe that, you know, the world would be better off if we weren't all trying to steal each other's secrets. On the other hand, in this world that we find ourselves in today with increasingly adversarial relations with

China, Russia, and a host of other countries, giving up on intelligence collection seems to be a kind of unilateral disarmament. We know the Chinese are doing whatever they can to scoop up our technology secrets, to learn what they can about what we're doing. And if we stop trying to learn what they're doing, it would give them an advantage. And the balance of power in the world could shift. And it might shift away from democratic countries to more authoritarian ones, as imperfect as our democracy may be. The CIA director would tell us that no matter how you feel about this stuff, it is the world that we live in. So it is either play or get play. Yeah, that's a very concise way of putting it.

Julian, thank you. I appreciate your time. Hey, good to be with you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. On Thursday, Pfizer asked federal regulators to authorize emergency use of its coronavirus vaccine for children ages 5 through 11, a move that could help protect more than 28 million kids in the United States. The FDA should be making a ruling sometime in November. And on Wednesday, a federal judge in Texas

halted the enforcement of a recently passed state law that bans nearly all abortions in the state. The law is one of several anti-abortion laws passed in recent years. The Texas law is one of the most strident, allowing for some retroactive penalties to be placed on a doctor or clinic that provides an abortion even while the statute is being legally debated. Today's episode was produced by Jessica Chung, Lindsay Garrison, Sydney Harper, Eric Krupke, and Soraya Shockley.

It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Patricia Willans, and engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Dan Powell, Alisha Ba'iitou, and Marion Lozano. Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and

Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. Do you want to do some different version of That's It for the Daily? That's It for the Daily. Thanks for joining us. I'm Ested Herndon. Michael Barbaro will be back on Monday. Should I do it again, or are we good?