Pentagon steps up offensive spy vs. spy operations with DIA unit
DIA's new mission adds to intel arsenal
By Pamela Hess
Associated Press Writer
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Wa****ngton - The Defense Intelligence Agency, long a home
for intelligence analysis, is joining the spy vs. spy game.
DIA joins just three other military organizations
authorized to carry out offensive counterintelligence
operations_ the Army Counterintelligence office, the Navy
Criminal Investigative Serve and the Air Force office of
Special Investigations.
The classified operations will be carried out by a small,
tightly controlled group at sites inside the United States
or outside, but only against foreigners. It's another
weapon in the Pentagon's arsenal against terrorism and
espionage.
"By and large these are not run to identify spies. They are
run to thwart what the officer is trying to do to us, and
to learn more about what they are trying to do to us," said
Toby Sullivan, the director of counterintelligence in the
Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence,
in a briefing Tuesday for re****ters.
Steven Aftergood, intelligence policy analyst at the
Federation of American Scientists in Wa****ngton, D.C., said
the offensive counterintelligence operations could include
planting a mole in a foreign intelligence service, passing
disinformation to mislead the other side, or even
disrupting enemy information systems.
"It's risky," he said. "It can also pay off enormously. In
intelligence as in football, an offense can be the best
defense."
Offensive counterintelligence is not a new capability but
it's new to the DIA. Two years ago, the agency got
permission to conduct offensive operations on a trial
basis. Now it is officially sanctioned.
"There have been spies caught," Sullivan said. He declined
to detail the successes, saying they are classified.
The Pentagon agency announced Aug. 3 that it had
consolidated its counterintelligence and human spying
operations into a single office, the Defense
Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. In the
process it picked up the new mission of thwarting foreign
intelligence agencies and terrorists attempts to gather
information or carry out attacks on the U.S. military.
The new counterintelligence organization absorbs budget,
personnel and mission of the six-year-old
Counterintelligence Field Activity, which managed a
database of potential threats to military bases, both
domestic and foreign. The database known as TALON became
the focus of concern about domestic spying when it was
revealed in December 2005 that the system included data on
antimilitary protests and other peaceful demonstrations. It
included the names of people who attended peace rallies.
A 2006 Pentagon review found that as many as 260 re****ts in
the database were improperly collected or kept there. At
the time, the Pentagon said there were about 13,000 entries
in the database, and that less than 2 percent either were
wrongly added or were not purged later when they were
determined not to involve real threats. The database was
shut down in September 2007.
More at:
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