It's easy to track America's covert operatives. All you
need to know is how to navigate the Internet.
By John Crewdson
Chicago Tribune senior
correspondent
Published March 12, 2006
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 the agency's 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, Italy, 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.
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Tribune researcher Brenda J. Kilianski contributed to this article from
Chicago.
jcrewdson@tribune.com