INTELLIGENCE FAILURES – U.S. INTELLIGENCE
An Indictment Exposes America’s Witless Intelligence Agencies
Monica Witt allegedly spied for Iran—but she defected in 2013, so she’ll never be brought to justice.
The case highlights how broken the U.S. intelligence system has become. For more than 30 years it has demonstrated an inability to keep secrets, to protect itself from foreign penetrations by hostile spy services, or to prevent current and former officials from defecting.
The result: Brave foreign nationals who risk their lives inside harsh regimes to spy for America are being killed and imprisoned on a significant scale.
Justice Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation officials portrayed Ms. Witt’s indictment as a victory of sorts, lauding the exposure of a foreign spy after a multiyear probe. Yet the real story is not Ms. Witt’s indictment but her defection to Iran in 2013. She brought with her details of a secret communications system American handlers use to talk to their recruited agents.
The FBI fumbled the case in 2012 by warning Ms. Witt she might be targeted for recruitment by Iranian intelligence. A trained counterspy, she knew that the tip-off meant she was under investigation and surveillance. It likely set in motion her flight to Iran a year later. As she boarded the plane, she texted her handler: “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.” Other texts reveal she “told all” to an Iranian ambassador in Central Asia and had plans to go public in the manner of renegade National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The indictment is largely symbolic, since the prospects of bringing the case to trial are slim to none. But it is one way for the FBI to dispose of the matter.
Officials did not detail the impact of Ms. Witt’s betrayal. Jay Taub, the FBI’s assistant director for national security, would say only that she became an “ideological” defector after converting to Islam. Her actions, he added, inflicted “serious damage to national security.”
According to prosecutors, Ms. Witt worked at the Air Force Office of Special Investigations from 2003-08 and then as a contractor, running an ultrasecret Special Access Program, or SAP, until August 2010. The program gave her access to details about counterintelligence operations, true names of recruited agents, and identities of U.S. intelligence operatives in charge of recruiting foreign agents. One program “allowed agents to communicate in the open without disclosing the nature of their operations,” the indictment states.
Ms. Witt left the contractor in August 2010 for unspecified reasons. In May 2011, Iranian state media announced that 30 people had been arrested as CIA spies and 42 others were suspected of involvement with U.S. intelligence.
It is not known how the agents were discovered, but a likely cause was a breakdown in agent-handler communications. Ms. Witt could conceivably have been involved. The indictment states that she provided defense information to Iran but does not say when. The spy charges cover the period from 2012-15. And that communications compromise appears to link the roundup in Iran to a second colossal intelligence failure under the Obama administration: the loss of all recruited agents in China.
Last year, the New York Times and Yahoo News both reported that between 20 and 30 recruited Chinese agents were killed or imprisoned between 2009 and 2013. Yahoo reported the loss was caused by a breach in an internet messaging system used to communicate with agents in Iran that spread to other countries. The Times blamed the loss on a former CIA officer, Jerry Chung Shin Lee, who was arrested in January 2018 and is suspected of passing along their names to China.
These recent losses follow decades of similar disasters. Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, spied for Moscow and gave up the agency’s network of agents working against the Soviet Union and Russia between 1985 and his arrest in 1993. At nearly the same time, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, also a turncoat counterspy, gave over secrets on recruited agents to Moscow between 1979 and 2001.
Ana Montes, the Defense Intelligence Agency’s senior analyst on Cuba, had already been recruited to spy for Havana when she joined DIA in 1985. Until her arrest in 2001, she helped Cuba neutralize all recruited CIA agents in the country. Another failure compromised all recruited agents in Eastern Europe during the Cold War.
These disasters and others can be traced to a lack of effective counterintelligence—finding and neutralizing foreign spies. Critics of the late CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton dismissed the efforts as “sickthink,” and since Angleton was ousted in the 1970s, counterintelligence has been the bastard stepchild of American intelligence.
Congress should demand quality controls on the $60 billion it appropriates for intelligence services each year. New and more effective counterintelligence programs should be a priority. A good first step would be to elevate the practice of neutralizing foreign spies to a strategic level of importance. This would involve better vetting and monitoring of those granted access to agent secrets, including after they leave government.
The most effective way to prevent further spy betrayals is to shift the focus toward offensive counterintelligence operations. That means devoting more people and funds to getting inside hostile spy services before they can penetrate U.S. intelligence agencies.
Mr. Gertz is senior editor of The Washington Free Beacon and national security columnist for The Washington Times. His most recent book is “iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age.”
