The Internet and the CIA

There's a disconcerting piece in today's Chicago Tribune (probably way more disconcerting if you happen to work undercover), which exposes blaring weaknesses within the CIA's covert operations. The gist of the article is that anyone who can navigate the internet can track many CIA "secret" offices, companies, safe houses and even agents working overseas. Not good!

The article states that one of the agency's weaknesses is the simple inexperience and naivete of recruits who unthinkingly may use their real name when on assignment.

Establishing a cover for someone who has worked in some other capacity also presents a problem:

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."

Short and longterm, the CIA has to get a handle on this pesky little problem, without sabotaging the integrity of the freeform internet.

Maybe they could use the internet to mislead and misdirect would-be infiltrators and data miners. Maybe they could create entire scenarios with ficticious agents and double agents. Better yet, maybe they could "leak" the names of enemy agents and operators as though they were covert CIA operatives and let the enemy take care of them.

Check out the article...it's a fascinating read!

Unrelated to the above article, but certainly no less fascinating, is a story about the CIA Museum, open only to employees and their families, which you can see at The Memory Hole. There's some amazing stuff on display!