The dangerous world of spying

Dozens of secret informants working for CIA undercover intelligence officers around the world have been arrested, executed or “turned” into double agents in recent years, according to a leaked classified cable sent to the spy agency’s stations abroad. The warning came from the CIA’s counter-intelligence department whose role is to ensure that foreign agents recruited as human intelligence (humint) sources are credible, trustworthy and protected. The vetting and monitoring of informants has become increasingly important as rival intelligence services in potentially hostile countries including China, Russia and Iran have devoted more resources to identifying CIA sources and eliminating them. Pakistan’s intelligence service (ISI) is also known to be adept at tracking down CIA informants. Despite advances in technological spying with satellite-linked communications interceptions and cyber espionage, humint remains a key element of the CIA’s clandestine service. Foreign agents paid to hand over secrets are always in danger of being exposed by their country’s own counter-intelligence operatives. In recent years the spy hunters in China, Russia, Iran, Pakistan and other countries have benefited from the revolution in artificial intelligence, facial recognition technology and computer hacking to track known CIA officers as they meet with their secret informants. The top secret cable circulated to all CIA station chiefs and leaked to The New York Times highlighted the risk of underestimating the counter-intelligence efforts being made by adversaries to hunt down moles. The cable identified the number of secret agents who had been executed by rival intelligence agencies in the last few years. The figure was not published by the paper but a reference was made to the “dozens” of foreign informants who had been executed, captured or compromised. The CIA’s counter-intelligence chiefs blamed the high death toll on poor tradecraft (the methods used for collecting secrets from agents), and being too eager to recruit sources without taking sufficient account of the security risks or the possibility of informants being turned and providing misleading or inaccurate intelligence that can have damaging repercussions. The credibility of foreign agents became a high-profile issue after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 when it emerged that both the CIA and Britain’s MI6 had relied on supposedly top-rank sources within the regime of Saddam Hussein who claimed the Iraqi dictator had built up a stock of weapons of mass destruction. The claims were false and both the CIA and MI6 had to introduce new vetting systems to ensure recruited agents were bona fide. During the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, count-terrorism became the key focus of America’s ntelligence agencies. And even today, with the withdrawal of all troops and intelligence-gathering apparatus removed from Afghanistan, the CIA and the Pentagon’s defence intelligence agency (DIA) will be trying to set up new sourcing networks in Pakistan and other neighbouring countries to try and keep tabs on any resurge of al-Qaeda. However, with China and Russia identified by the US as the main great-power rivals, the CIA and other US intelligence agencies view these two countries as the prime targets for espionage. But it is acknowledged that both China and Russia present an exceptionally high-risk and challenging environment for humint operations. Post-Cold War the worst cases of CIA informants being uncovered and punished occurred in China. Beijing effectively dismantled the agency’s network of spies between 2010 and 2012. It was claimed then that 18 CIA informants in China were killed or imprisoned. The potential for such losses appears to be still prevalent today judging by the warning cable. The devastation of the CIA’s network in China ten years ago revived memories of the damage caused by the betrayals of Aldrich Ames, a CIA officer, and Robert Hanssen of the FBI who worked secretly for years for the KGB. Their treachery led to the deaths of numerous intelligence agents in Moscow between the 1970s and early 2000s. The CIA declined to comment on the leaked cable.