June 2, 2000
Government Rejects a Plan To Aid Counterintelligence
By JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, June 1 -- An ambitious plan to create a post to
oversee the government's spy-catching efforts has been shelved by
the Clinton administration, largely because of strong opposition
from Attorney General Janet Reno, federal officials said today.
The job of a national counterintelligence executive was proposed
to answer widespread criticism of the government's efforts to
combat espionage.
The official would have been asked to develop and oversee a
strategy to protect the nation's secrets. He would have tried to
stay a step ahead of foreign spies by identifying what
information -- in government and in industry -- would be the most
enticing to other governments.
The proposal, the product of a yearlong interagency review,
gained high-level support, including from Louis J. Freeh, the
director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; George J.
Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and John J. Hamre,
who until recently was deputy secretary of defense, officials
said.
But Ms. Reno blocked the proposal, and some officials said they
believed that her opposition was the product of her ongoing feud
with Mr. Freeh, whose agency is charged with overseeing domestic
counterintelligence.
In letters and conversations with other officials, Ms. Reno
indicated that she believed the agency needed to solve its own
internal problems with counterintelligence instead of adding a
new layer of bureaucracy.
Ms. Reno and Mr. Freeh have been at odds over a wide variety of
issues over the past few years, most notably Mr. Freeh's
recommendation, which she rejected, that she appoint an
independent counsel to investigate campaign fund-raising abuses
by Democrats in the 1996 presidential election.
Opposition to the counterintelligence plan, called CI-21, also
surfaced within the F.B.I., where some senior officials were said
to fear that it would erode the bureau's authority over
spy-hunting operations.
And some Clinton administration officials said they believed that
the interagency panel, formed last summer, had gone too far by
calling for major changes in the counterintelligence structure
without adequately consulting with other officials throughout the
government.
"The idea of a new counterintelligence executive is probably not
going to work the way it was proposed," a senior administration
official acknowledged.
Still, officials said, many of the panel's ideas for changing the
direction of counterintelligence may be incorporated in more a
modest reorganization plan in the future. A high-level review of
counterintelligence is still underway within the administration,
they said.
"It's clear that the CI-21 initiative has succeeded in focusing
attention, and what will emerge from that is still evolving,"
said the Defense Department spokesman, Kenneth H. Bacon.
Despite the debate over the proposed reorganization, there is
widespread agreement among senior officials that the government
has failed to keep pace with the rapidly changing espionage
threats faced by the United States in a post-cold-war,
information-age era.
Critics agree that the F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency
and the Pentagon have found it difficult to shift gears after
decades spent keeping tabs on traditional adversaries, like
K.G.B. agents working out of the Soviet embassy in Washington.
Today, as the sole remaining economic and military superpower,
the United States faces a wider range of espionage threats than
ever before, from both allied and unfriendly nations eager to
steal information not just from the C.I.A. or the Pentagon but
from corporations and research institutes.
France, Israel, China, India, Russia and other countries are
believed to have turned their focus on the United States to
obtain sensitive and economically significant scientific and
technological information, as well as traditional military and
national security secrets.
Intelligence officials made some changes after the 1994 arrest of
Aldrich Ames, the C.I.A. officer who spied for the Soviet Union.
But several officials said they believed that the National
Counterintelligence Center, established at the agency after the
Ames case, had largely failed to provide coordination for
counterintelligence. The center would have been abolished under
the proposed restructuring.
Flaws in the government's handling of some high-profile espionage
cases, including the investigation of Wen Ho Lee, the former
government scientist accused of mishandling government secrets,
have underscored the need for counterintelligence reform,
officials say.
In the Lee case, an 800-page classified report by the Justice
Department has just been completed detailing the mistakes made
both at the F.B.I. and at the Justice Department in the way they
handled investigation. The report is said to offer an
even-handed critique of the government's failures in the
controversial Lee case.
The report criticizes the F.B.I. for its failure to aggressively
investigate evidence that China may have stolen American nuclear
weapons data, as well as its decision to focus on Dr. Lee early
in that investigation. But it also is critical of the Justice
Department for its failure to approve F.B.I. requests to wiretap
Dr. Lee.
While he was never charged with espionage, Dr. Lee was accused
of mishandling classified material after investigators found that
he had downloaded large amounts of sensitive nuclear weapons
design information and then copied it onto portable computer
tapes. Some of those tapes are now missing. Dr. Lee has said
he is innocent of the charges.
The reorganization proposed in the new initiative would not have
altered the F.B.I.'s authority to handle criminal investigations
into spy cases.
But it would have created a board made up of senior officials
from the C.I.A., F.B.I. and Pentagon and advised by other
agencies like State and Treasury. Its executive would have set
the broad direction of counterintelligence strategy, and would
had access to information about ongoing espionage cases.
But the main task of the new executive and the board would have
been to change the nature of counterintelligence. Rather than
simply waiting for evidence that a spy had already stolen
secrets, the new executive would have been asked to bring an
analytical approach to the field, both studying America's
vulnerabilities while trying to determine which secrets were
likely to be sought by other countries.
"It's terribly unfortunate that the Attorney General has seen fit
to torpedo this, because the concept is very good and absolutely
necessary as we face counterintelligence threats that are as
great as ever," said Paul Redmond, a former chief of
counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency.
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~~~~~~~~ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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