'Shattered': Inside the secret battle to save America's undercover spies in the digital age by JennaMC_Laugh, zachsdorfman
government — stole data on nearly 22 million former and current American civil servants, including intelligence officials.
The familiar trope of Jason Bourne movies and John le Carré novels where spies open secret safes filled with false passports and interchangeable identities is already a relic, say former officials — swept away by technological changes so profound that they're forcing the CIA to reconsider everything from how and where it recruits officers to where it trains potential agency personnel.
But the project, which has not been previously reported on, was battered by bureaucratic resistance and hollowed out by financial and administrative neglect; it died an unceremonious death over the last few years. What began as a bold experiment was eventually reduced to what other agency officials saw as simply an expensive proposal to design an open-office floor plan for CIA outposts around the world, say two former intelligence officials.
Whether the U.S. intelligence agencies will be able to make these radical changes is unclear, but without a fundamental transformation, officials warn, the nation faces an unprecedented crisis in its ability to collect human intelligence. While some believe that a return to tried and true tradecraft will be sufficient to protect undercover officers, others fear the business of human spying is in mortal peril and that the crisis will ultimately force the U.S.
Italian investigators, eager to get to the bottom of the audacious abduction on their streets, were later able to track a web of cellphones communicating only with each other in close proximity to the disappearance, leading them to a series of hotel bills, credit card statements and other identifying indicators, according to a 2007 investigation unveiled at an annual hacker conference in 2013.
In the 2000s, the explosion in biometrics — such as fingerprints, facial recognition and iris scans — propelled the conversation forward, according to multiple former intelligence officials. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that in many parts of the world, within a short time, all alias work would likely become impossible.
CIA officials also concluded that the days of operating under multiple personas in a single country were over, and began moving toward a “one country, one alias” rule. Undercover officers could no longer fly into a country on one passport and use a separate ID to check into a hotel, and all future trips to that country had to be conducted under the same fake identity.
U.S. officials believed that Chinese intelligence may have shifted to more low- or no-tech methods after cracking the CIA’s covert communications system around this time, or because of training with their Russian counterparts, says this person. Russian intelligence operatives, meanwhile, began shifting their meetings with sources to countries with less sophisticated biometric systems, say two former senior officials, favoring certain Central and South American countries.
Even so, while Congress pressed the CIA to use more NOCs, who often pose as businesspeople, the intelligence oversight committees were concerned about the officers’ security. In the 2006 Intelligence Authorization Act, the Senate Intelligence Committee demanded a report from the CIA that would address “the emerging threats posed by technological developments to NOC operations.”
Around 2010, the FBI also began experimenting with new ways of maintaining cover, particularly when trying to recruit foreigners on U.S. soil, through a new initiative known as the National Security Recruitment Program, according to five former officials. The FBI program, which has not been previously reported on, involved close cooperation with the CIA’s National Resources Division, the agency’s clandestine domestic operational wing.
But the program was saddled by bureaucratic red tape and was sometimes “sloppy,” says one former senior official. A second former senior official recalls the closure of an undercover operation based out of a 100-person office space in the San Francisco Bay Area because of “careless activity by FBI employees” and “possible digital compromise.”
The NOC program, which was always expensive, was becoming even riskier, a concern that has prompted ongoing conversations within the agency about whether it’s worth the investment, according to two former officials. The intelligence community has developed sophisticated “backstopping” procedures, which seed a cover story through web traffic, emails and other digital channels. But in an interconnected world, “good backstopping can be defeated in a Google search,” says one former senior intelligence official.
The agency, which former officials say recruits and emplaces NOCs in the technology, finance and film industries, among other sectors, targets both major U.S. corporations and smaller U.S. companies, which are sometimes preferred because they are not beholden to shareholders. The digital threat to cover “was a major issue, even before I arrived at the agency,” says Avril Haines, who served as CIA deputy director from 2013 to 2015. “One way to frame our approach to the many challenges posed by technology was to ‘do less, but do it better,’ which meant focusing on what was most important and then spending the time and resources needed to keep it secret. We had conversations with other allied services who were experiencing similar challenges.
For the bureau, the single biggest takeaway from these high-level discussions, say two former senior officials, was the need to create programs where undercover employees would have no link to the FBI whatsoever. That meant no training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.; no history of overt FBI work before being selected for undercover assignments; and no data trail of text messages or emails linking these personnel to the bureau in any form.
By midway through the Obama administration, the CIA and FBI were creating “extensive digital legends with increasing sophistication,” as one former senior official puts it, with cooperation from key government agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and the IRS. The pressures of the digital age have led the CIA to favor flexibility and deniability. The agency has formed a new reserve officer program to allow spies to work in the private sector, especially the tech industry, says a former intelligence official. The program is designed to allow those operatives to maintain their clearances so they can return seamlessly to the agency after a few years, says this person.
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