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If you believe the FBI affidavit against him filed in federal court, Hanssen betrayed spies working for the United States, some of whom were then executed. Among many other feats, he allegedly ratted on "an entire technical program of enormous value, expense and importance to the United States," which turns out to have been the construction of a tunnel under the new Soviet Embassy in Washington D.C. He trundled documents by the cartload to "dead drops" in various suburbs around Washington D.C., often within a few minutes walk from his house.
It's amusing to listen to U.S. counter-intelligence officials now scorning Hanssen for lack of "tradecraft" in using the same drop week after week. These are the same counter- intelligence officials who remained incurious across the decades about the tinny clang of empty drawers in their TOP SECRET filing cabinets, the contents of which were removed on a daily basis by both Aldrich Ames and Hanssen, who deemed the use of copying machines too laborious. In just one assignment, the CIA later calculated, Ames gave the KGB a stack of documents estimated to be 15 to 20 feet high. Hanssen was slack about "tradecraft" because he knew just how remote the possibility of discovery was. The only risk he couldn't accurately assess was the one that brought him down: betrayal by a Russian official privy to the material he was sending to Moscow.
The record of proven failure by U.S. intelligence agencies is long and dismal. To take two of the most notorious derelictions, the CIA failed to predict the Sino-Soviet split and also missed out on the fact that the Soviet Union was falling apart, a lapse that the Agency later tried to blame on Ames. In the mid-1990s, CIA director John Deutch testified to Congress that "taken as a whole, Ames' activities facilitated the Soviet, and later the Russian, effort to engage in perception management operations by feeding carefully selected information to the United States through agents they were controlling without our knowledge ... (O)ne of the primary purposes of the perception management program was to convince us that the Soviets remained a superpower and that their military R&D program was robust."
So here was Deutch (himself scandalously pardoned by Clinton after personally perpetrating some of the most egregious security lapses in the CIA's history) claiming that treachery by its man Ames was the reason the CIA failed to notice the Soviet Union was falling apart. Following that line of analysis Ames could have entered a plea of innocence on the grounds that in helping the Soviet Union exaggerate its might he was only following official Agency policy. One of the prime functions of the CIA in the Cold War years was to inflate the military capabilities of the Soviet Union, thereby assisting military contractors and their allies in Congress and the Pentagon in the extraction of money to build more weapons to counter these entirely imaginary Soviet threats.
Back in the mid-1970s, CIA director George H.W. Bush found that the regular CIA analysts were making insufficiently alarmist assessments of Soviet might and promptly installed Team B, a group replete with trained exaggerators who contrived the lies necessary to justify the soaring Pentagon procurement budgets of the Reagan Eighties.
The higher the grade of secrets relayed by a spy, the less his employers are inclined to believe them. The Soviets for many years thought Kim Philby was a triple agent sending them disinformation. Anyway, real secrets, such as divert the mighty over breakfast, don't concern weapons but gossip: the exact capabilities of Dick Cheney's heart, sexual peccadilloes of public figures, and so forth. That's the sort of stuff J. Edgar Hoover used to keep in his safe. These days, the nation's real intelligence work is being done by the National Inquirer. We could cut off the CIA's and FBI's intelligence budgets and improve the security of this nation at once.
A final parable about another intelligence debacle: failure to predict Egypt's attack on Israel in the Yom Kippur war in October of 1973. In fact, a CIA analyst called Fred Fear had noticed earlier that year that the Egyptians were buying a lot of bridging equipment from the Russians.
Assessing the nature and amount of this equipment, Fear figured out where the bridges would be deployed across the Suez Canal and how many troops could get across them. He wrote a report, with maps, predicting how the Egyptians would attack. His superiors ignored it until the attack took place. Then they hauled it out, tore off the maps and sent them to the White House, labeled as "current intelligence."
While the Egyptians were planning the Yom Kippur assault, they found the Israelis had built a defensive sand wall. Tests disclosed the best way to breach this wall would be with high pressure hoses. So they ordered the necessary fire hoses from a firm in West Germany, putting out the cover story that Sadat was promising a fire engine to every Egyptian village. Then a strike in the West German hose factory held up production into the fall of 1973. As the days ticked away, the desperate Egyptians finally deployed all Egyptian cargo planes to Frankfurt to pick up the fire hoses. The planes crammed the airfield. Frankfurt is a notorious hub for intelligence agencies. None of them noticed.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.