DC-based Counterintelligence Courses Now Open For Registration! (Shameless Self Promotion)

How would you like to take counterintel courses for graduate credit from some of the most experienced CI professionals in the world?  Now you can...

Mercyhurst College has been teaching counterintelligence courses in the DC area for a number of years.  Traditionally, we have done this in coordination with a government or private partner.  This year, however, we have decided to open these classes up to qualified students throughout the DC area.

These courses (there are three of them) make up our Graduate Certificate in Counterintelligence.  All of the classes are accredited, of course, and are taught one per quarter for three quarters.  If you want the certificate, you would need to take all three and take them in series.  If you are just interested in learning more about the CI field, then you could opt to take just the first course -- it is entirely your call. 

The first course in this series will be offered in early September and run for approximately 10 weeks.  The course is not offered online and will meet once a week in the evening at a location in the vicinity of Tyson's Corner.  There are no pre-requisites other than a bachelors degree from an accredited university.

The courses are taught by Brian Kelley, Bob Stephan and Ray Batvinis.  Kelley spent more than 20 years in the DO at CIA working both defensive and offensive CI ops; Stephan is the author of Stalin's Secret War and has over 20 years expereince with CIA, DIA and the USAF; Batvinis spent 25 years at the FBI working on CI issues at the highest levels.

Because of their experience and contacts, one of the unique aspects of these classes are the kinds of guest speakers they can draw.  For example, in the last class they were able to bring together Plato Cacheris and John Martin (the defense attorney and the federal prosecutor in the Robert Hanssen case) for a one-of-a-kind roundtable.

This brief note cannot do either this course or the guys teaching it justice.  If you want more information, please do not hesitate to contact the director of our online and distance learning programs, Linda Bremmer, at 814 824 2170 or lbremmer at mercyhurst dot edu. 

Registration is now open!

France Spying On The Brits? Quel Surprise! (Daily Mail)

According to the Daily Mail, a Tory Member of Parliament, Patrick Mercer, is claiming that he has been told by "senior security sources" that the French placed bugs in the office of a former Defense Procurement Minister, Lord Paul Drayson (Thanks, Justin!). Drayson resigned from his position, apparently unexpectedly, in November, 2007.

Whatever the truth of the story, the idea that the French are engaged in economic espionage is old news. I had a group of students look at CI threats to the US a few years ago (as part of a class project) and one of the threats they identified was from the French. According to one article they found (sorry, no hyperlink but the citation is: Blood, Christopher G., Holding Foreign Nations Civilly Accountable For Their Economic Espionage Practice, IDEA: The Journal of Law And Technology, VOL 42. No. 2, p. 231), the French bugged their business class seats in Air France flights in the early 70's. National Defense Magazine (a publication of the National Defense Industrial Association) cited a Public Administration Review article claiming that France was a "major offender" when it came to economic espionage.

The National Counterintelligence Executive used to publish annual reports to Congress on Foreign Economic and Industrial Espionage. The last available one, unfortunately, is from 2005 (download full text here) and it contains little about French activities (perhaps because there were none...). The most interesting chart in the context of the current story is the one on display below which shows that the French get fairly routine access to DOD facilities and to military industry in the US but are certainly not the only ones.

With Spies Like These... (Washington Post)

Many people believe that the lack of human intelligence resources, among other things, led to the US intelligence community's mistaken belief that Iraq still had WMDs. Since then, there has been a good deal written about and apparently done to increase the US's clandestine capability.

It is this conventional wisdom that is going to make this Washington Post editorial so controversial. The author, Joseph Weisberg, believes that such spies, even if they existed, "wouldn't have made any difference."

Other highlights:

• "Ever since the inception of the CIA, the operational side of the agency has both believed in and spread the fantasy that foreign agents can provide vital secret intelligence that will clear up great mysteries, change the outcome of wars or prevent terrorist attacks. But this view of intelligence is a myth."

• "Intelligence from almost all CIA assets is unreliable for the simple reason that so many of them are double agents, meaning that the CIA recruited them but that they are being controlled by their own countries' intelligence services."

• "This does not mean that there isn't some useful intelligence to be gleaned from various human sources -- just that these sources aren't always going to be recruited agents and that they aren't going to prevent terrorist attacks or change the outcome of wars."

Related posts:

In Praise Of Open Source
Nada Nadim Prouty: Inevitable

Origins Of FBI Counterintelligence And More (LOC)

The Library of Congress provides an excellent teaching/training/research resource through its periodic webcasts. One of the most recent is a 50+ minute presentation on the Origins of FBI Counterintelligence done by Ray Batvinis (who has just authored a book on the same topic).

Other webcasts that may be of interest include:

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy

Why Terrorist Ideologies are So Powerful

War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda"

The African Colonial State and the Encounter with Decolonization

China's Return to Tradition: How to Interpret the New Forces Emerging in China

China Rediscovers its Own History

You will need a RealPlayer plug-in to view the webcasts.

Nada Nadim Prouty: Inevitable

There has been a good bit of coverage in the press about the case of Nada Nadim Prouty and her ability to slink past both the CIA and the FBI counterintelligence efforts over the last eight years. There is still an ongoing discussion as to how much damage Prouty has actually done but there seems to be a growing belief in the op-ed pages that such a mistake is the result of incompetence.

Whether there was incompetence involved or not, such cases are increasingly inevitable. They are a mathematical function of the size of the intelligence community and the impossibility of a perfectly efficient clearance system.

Consider the numbers: There are approximately 100,000 people in the intelligence community. Out of this 100,000, how many are spies? It has to be more than 0 but it is likely less than 1000 (which is only 1% of the population of the intelligence community, BTW...). It can't be 1000. If it is 1000 or more, I think we can all agree that we are sunk anyway.

Let's say it is 100. That is not only a nice round number but also means that just one in 1000 people you might meet in the halls of the CIA, DIA or NSA is a spy. If you look at the number of spies caught over the last few years and compare it to the size of the community (roughly), the number 100 actually starts to make a lot of sense. Its not a perfect number by any means but it is a good place to start.

What then, is our ability to catch spies? Well, no one knows that but lets say it is 99%. In other words, every year we catch 99% of the spies in the intel community. Now 99% is probably way too high. I don't think anyone thinks we are doing that well catching spies. Let's give people the benefit of the doubt, though.

If we are catching 99% of the spies each year and we have 100 spies in the community then, at the end of the year, we will catch 99 and one will slip through the net. It is mathematically inevitable.

There are two additional consequences to this line of reasoning. First, it pretty much proves that either we don't have a system that is capable of catching 99% of the spies every year or we have a lot more than 100 spies in the system. Prouty worked in the community for 8 years and to be that lucky in the face of a system that capable of catching spies each year is stretching reality. If you jump the number of spies up to 1000 (still only 1% of the workforce) then you are looking at 10 spies getting away each year and the odds that Ms. Prouty could go about her business unmolested by the CI types for eight years goes up as well. Since we already decided that the total number of spies in the community couldn't realistically be 1000 spies (that's nearly 63 spies in each of the intel community's 16 agencies), it pretty much has to be that the spy catching ability is less than 99%. Far less. Which means that there are likely lots of spies (say 100?) running around. It is, as noted, a mathematical consequence of a large community and a less than perfect system for catching spies.

The second consequence is a result of what scientists call false positives. Virtually all testing systems generate some level of false positives -- where, in this case, the system says someone is a spy but, in reality, they aren't. What if only 1% of the cases within our hypothetically 99% accurate system are false positives ? Out of 100,000 people, that is still 1000 people. 1000 people currently employed by the intel community that are accused of being a spy when, in fact, they are not. They would falsely lose their clearance and their job and may even face jail time.

It is very difficult to imagine that the false positive rate is only 1%. That rivals the rates in systems much more amenable to verification than a system that involves humans. It is also hard to believe that the intelligence community fires or imprisons 1000 people a year for being spies. First, I think we would have heard about it and, second, imagine the morale problems such dismissals would cause.

Which means the system is lying to itself.

With 100,000 people in the community, false positive rates at anything higher than 1% would cause thousands to come under suspicion. These thousands of cases would have to be resolved, mostly by dismissal of the case, otherwise the morale and effectiveness of the intel community would come under serious attack. There is no way out. Either dismiss lots of people as an inevitable result of a nearly but not quite perfect system or dismiss lots of cases in order to preserve the morale and effectiveness of the community.

The real negative impact of this case may not be in the information Prouty may or may not have stolen and passed to Hezbollah but in the chilling effect it will have on diversity hiring. The DNI has recently stated in his 500 day plan that one of the major goals is to "Improve Recruiting, Hiring and Retention of Heritage Americans (1st and 2nd Generation Americans)". The intent behind this goal is to "employ, develop, and retain a dynamic, agile workforce that reflects diversity in its broadest context — cultural background, language capability, ethnicity, race, gender, and expertise." How much more difficult will it be for Arab-Americans, for example, to get a clearance as a result of this case? How many Arab-Americans will willingly go through the clearance system (background checks, polygraph, etc.) as a result of this case? How will this impact other ethnicities and their perception of the intelligence community? How will this impact the security clearance process in general? The realistic answers to these questions do not look promising if one is concerned about meeting the goals of the 500 day plan.