-Caveat Lector- to persecute them. George Szamuely http://www.nypress.com/content.cfm?content_id=3815&now=03/13/2001 &content_section=1#szamuely The Bunker Counterintelligence It is a safe assumption that almost everything we have been told about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent charged with espionage, is untrue. Take the matter of his arrest. The FBI says it picked him up as he dropped off classified papers for his Russian handler at a park in Vienna, VA. For a man who supposedly was extraordinarily prudent, this would seem to be amazingly reckless behavior. The chances of being observed are high. Besides, aren’t there easier ways to deliver top-secret documents? What about microfilms, computer disks, e-mail? Oddly enough, the FBI nabbed Hanssen but did not bother to wait for the Russian to show up. Wouldn’t that have been conclusive proof of espionage, not to mention a spectacular propaganda coup at the expense of Vladimir Putin? We have also been told that the information that alerted the U.S. government to Hanssen’s treachery came from a CIA double agent working for Russian intelligence. It seems bizarre for us to be crowing about this. Aren’t the Russians now likely to launch a mole-hunt to find the traitor in their midst? Sure enough, The Washington Post is already writing breathlessly: "The Russian government has launched an aggressive probe to determine who within its ranks may have provided the United States with the KGB case file that led to the arrest of FBI agent Robert P. Hanssen… Russian President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, and other senior government officials in Moscow are involved in the investigation." Now, a former KGB man like Putin would suspect that talk of a CIA double agent may just be a U.S. ruse to provoke the Russians into self- destructive recriminations. On the other hand, that may be exactly what the Americans want him to think. The point is, very little of what the FBI is putting out now should be believed. The FBI claims that Hanssen betrayed the names of U.S. agents to the Russians. The men were arrested, tried and executed. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether we really know the fate of agents in Russia. It would not have made much sense for the Russians to respond to Hanssen’s revelations in such a fashion. If you discover that one of your agents is in reality a double agent, you don’t arrest him and thereby endanger your source. You use him to feed false information to your enemy. And there were other absurd stories. Best of all was the one put out by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Apparently Hanssen had revealed to the Russians a secret tunnel the U.S. government had built under their Washington Embassy so as to listen in on secret communications. Whether Hanssen did or did not reveal this to the Russians, it really does not matter. It is hard to think of a project more futile. Important communications between Moscow and the Embassy are coded. Encryption has ensured that coded messages today are completely indecipherable. Russian Embassy secretaries ordering lunch from the Chinese takeout would have been the only messages the U.S. intelligence services could have listened to. According to a wild Miami Herald story, Hanssen "may have sold Russia information on how the United States tracks foreign submarines and sniffs out nuclear, chemical and biological weapons... The loss of such technical secrets could demolish a number of the nation’s most important intelligence programs and wipe out more than a billion dollars in research and investment." This is ludicrous. At most, Hanssen may have revealed to the Russians something about how Americans spy on them over here. Yet these wild claims have a purpose: to fuel Washington hysteria about America’s supposed vulnerability to terrorism and espionage. According to CIA Director George Tenet, "technology has enabled, driven, or magnified the threat to us… [A]ge- old resentments threaten to spill over into open violence; and…a growing perception of our so-called ‘hegemony’ has become a lightning rod for the disaffected." Even before the Hanssen arrest, the FBI had been rapidly expanding its counterintelligence activities. Last year a congressional report by the National Commission on Terrorism criticized the CIA and FBI for being "overly risk averse" in investigating terrorist organizations. Last year, the Senate Appropriations Committee proposed spending $23 million to fund a new domestic counterterrorism "czar." Last year also, the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would create a "Council of Terrorism Preparedness," to be chaired by the president. Then in January, just two weeks before the end of his term, Bill Clinton issued a presidential directive, creating the office of "counterintelligence czar." The directive institutionalizes a program called "Counterintelligence 21," whose purpose is to facilitate cooperation between the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon. The "counterintelligence czar" would be appointed by, and would be answerable to, a national counterintelligence board of directors consisting of the FBI director, the deputy director of the CIA, the deputy secretary of defense and a senior official from the Justice Dept. He would also attend to the needs of the corporate sector. According to the directive, the office of the "czar" "will conduct and coordinate CI [counterintelligence] vulnerability surveys throughout government, and with the private sector as appropriate… It will engage government and private sector entities to identify more clearly and completely what must be protected. The Office will conduct and coordinate CI community outreach programs in the government and private sector." This program dwarfs Nixon’s Huston Plan. Nothing like this had ever been implemented during the Cold War when the United States faced serious rivals. "Everyone who works this problem has quickly realized that the old paradigm of the threats to U.S. national security–hostile nations and their intelligence services–is far too narrow a definition in the post-Cold War era. There are countless potential bad guys capable of doing us significant harm," says John MacGaffin, a CIA and FBI consultant and one of the geniuses behind "Counterintelligence 21." Apparently, national security is no longer about protecting the military. It is about defending the banking system, the Internet and America’s technologies. "Counterintelligence 21" is sure to foster national paranoia, not to mention a massive expansion of the powers of government. President Bush has indicated that he intends to go ahead with it. -- Best Wishes God is dead, but fifty thousand social workers have risen to take his place. - J. D. 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